"Cloudonomics" is the term coined by AT&T's Joe Weinman, who has been doing a great job of investigating the true economic costs of cloud computing in recent years.
Essentially, the growing shift to cloud-based IT means throwing old assumptions and TCO (total cost of ownership) formulas out the window and looking at new ways business and technology will be mixing.
Chandar Pattabhiram of Cast Iron Systems and I will be exploring the economic issues of cloud computing in the kick-off session on "The Economics of Cloud Computing" at the upcoming Cloud QCamp on April 7th. (We may be joined b a third speaker -- I'll keep you posted.) For anyone interested in service orientation, virtualization, and utility computing, this is not a conference to be missed.
Our Cloud Economics session will launch a day packed full of presentations from leading thinkers and doers such as Dave Linthicum, Phil Wainewright, Boomi's Richard Nucci. (More speakers to be announced -- stay tuned!)
The economics of cloud computing can look enormously attractive, especially when weighing the costs of storage or processing at a few cents per instance or gigabyte, versus the tens of thousands of dollars in up-front investments required for on-site solutions. Cloud providers can deliver economies of scale not available to individual enterprises.
But over the long run, do these huge savings hold up or collapse for enterprises? What about the costs associated with integration, configuration, data deduplication, and monitoring? Also, do enterprises need to look beyond cost and consider other potential benefits of cloud computing, such as the ability to focus resources on the business, versus IT maintenance? What about costs related to loss of control and customization? Or potential loss of competitive advantage that may be inherent in on-site, customized systems?
This session will examine the economic pros and cons of on-demand versus on-site computing, and where these approaches may or may not work.
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