Survey: 'Jury Is Still Out' on Cost Benefits of the Cloud

Apptio, the Seattle, Wash.-based provider of on-demand Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions, announced the findings of a survey conducted in partnership with the Worldwide Executive Council (WEC), a research firm that facilitates dialogue between executives and Wall Street investors. The survey titled "IT Survey on Cloud Computing, Virtualization, and IT Financial Services," provides fresh insights into how CIOs and other IT decision-makers at large enterprise organizations are evaluating and implementing cloud technologies, with a focus on the specific financial metrics they use to rationalize their investment in cloud services.

While enterprise CIOs anticipate making a significant investment in private and public cloud technologies over the next 12 months, the survey reveals that the majority of IT decision makers don't have the necessary metrics to build an intelligent business case for moving applications and infrastructure components to the cloud. Moreover, the vast majority of those surveyed indicated that they neither possess the ability to track utilization nor are they able to recover these costs via "chargeback" or "showback" methods, further complicating their ability to calculate ROI for the business.

Key findings of the survey include:

• 80 percent of respondents get some amount of their current server infrastructure delivered through a private cloud, however, nearly 90 percent report they are not charging end-users based on their private cloud consumption, representing a significant gap in financial transparency and accountability of IT service costs.
• While a majority of IT executives (64 percent) believe that tracking utilization levels of virtualized and cloud infrastructures will be "important" or "very important" during the next 12 months, nearly 40 percent said they are not currently tracking utilization levels of virtualized and cloud infrastructure.
• Almost 90 percent of IT leaders surveyed believe it will be either "important" or "very critical" to improve IT services tracking in virtualized and cloud environments in the coming year.