Marcus Holm’s research while affiliated with Cisco Systems, Inc and other places

Interest in cloud computing is growing, and, as a result, there is much information about it - both positive and negative. On the one hand, cloud computing saves money because it does not require IT infrastructure, servers, and it is very scalable. On the other hand, it might lead to financial loss due to security risks, possible data access problems, data privacy policies, etc. Therefore, cloud computing evaluation based on financial metrics is proposed in this article. This paper consists of four major sections. The first section is a literature review of cloud computing and its types. The next section describes some common financial metrics such as CBA, ROI and TCO and describes how they might be applied to evaluate cloud computing. The third section proposes evaluation strategies, and the last section contains the evaluation of a series of cloud computing projects based on chosen evaluation strategies, and results are verified based on expert opinion.