The Atos Consulting Cloud Opportunity Assessment offers a proven methodology to identify your technological and commercial opportunities to build your cloud strategy.

The 2008/2009 recession has further increased the dependency of businesses on IT. Businesses today have more than ever a sharp focus on revenue generation and expense reduction. To meet these requirements more effectively than in the past, IT organizations are being asked to use computing technology to track down every sales lead, automate and improve customer service, and build additional revenue streams, all while reducing capital and operational expenses.

A few years ago, outsourcing or hosting was the only answer to many of these issues and, in fact, today, most outsourcing providers are able to deliver the self service, on-demand IT resource consumption models that organizations require to react quickly to business needs and to defer capital IT expenses. But cloud services will be able to offer an even greater scalability and flexibility.

Issues for companies to understand:

• Which new applications can be enabled by cloud computing
• For which existing applications cloud computing can be applied
• Potential consequences and opportunities for the business model, and business model innovation
• Which cloud models, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Business as a Service (BaaS), private, public, or hybrid cloud can be applied
• How to leverage cloud technologies and services available on the market: what to keep internal or outsource.

Benefits of Cloud computing:

• Significantly lower application service costs, currently as low as $20/month for entry-level web applications
• Dramatically reduced capital expenditure funding, with services charged for primarily by use
• Improved service agility, where requirements for IT services can be much more quickly met
• Improved productivity through cost-effective business-wide collaboration applications
• New opportunities for exploiting and sharing information, in support of business model innovation.