10. Cloud economics

Estimates of the economic benefits of Cloud solutions vary widely. It's easy to measure the cost of a Cloud solution. On the other hand, it's less easy to obtain equivalent significant cost figures for a company.

However, there are several cases where the comparison is straightforward.

Application development: the advantages are multi-faceted. Firstly, development machines and networks can be supplied immediately, without any upfront investment. This is an essential element of any agile approach. Machine cloning and snapshots enable easy implementation and rollback. Configurations required for maintenance operations or load testing are brought online only when necessary, eliminating the need to tie up costly configurations. Development infrastructure costs are divided by factors of 10 to 100.

Applications in SaaS...