New Cloud Survey Concludes 'Jury is Still Out' on Cost Benefits of the Cloud

Apptio, a provider of on-demand Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions, announced the findings of a survey conducted in partnership with the Worldwide Executive Council (WEC). The survey 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 twelve months, the survey reveals that the majority of IT decision makers often 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", further complicating their ability to calculate ROI for the business.

Key findings of the survey include:

-- 80% of respondents get some amount of their current server infrastructure delivered through a private cloud, however, nearly 90% 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%) believe that tracking utilization levels of virtualized and cloud infrastructures will be "important" or "very important" during the next 12 months, nearly 40% said they are not currently tracking utilization levels of virtualized and cloud infrastructure;

-- Almost 90% 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;

-- 80% of IT executives surveyed believe metrics related to cloud would grow in importance over the next 12 months and almost 75% believe there is very high value in being able to accurately measure the COGS for their 'cloud-based' operations; and

-- Nearly one-half of executives surveyed (48%) report the cost of cloud services to their business units as a lump sum of all IT costs while more than 20% do not provide any reporting back to their business units. 

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