Cloud computing infrastructures underpin an ever-increasing range of business tools, yet measures of cloud service adoption based on business ICT usage surveys give only a partial view of their diffusion. They do not reveal the intensity or volume of use by businesses, or the amount spent on cloud services. This paper assesses the extent to which insights on the use of commercial cloud services (i.e. services purchased from external providers) can be gleaned from economic and business statistics - in particular, from supply-use tables and the underlying business surveys. The paper examines the defining features of cloud services and their treatment in various statistical product classifications, before deriving estimates on the use of specific “cloud-containing product classes” across businesses. A key finding is that efforts are needed to improve the availability of data that can be used to gain robust insights on business use of cloud services.

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies.

Measuring the Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for the Future provides new insights into the state of the digital transformation by mapping indicators across a range of areas – from education and innovation, to trade and economic and social outcomes – against current digital policy issues, as presented in Going Digital: Shaping Policies, Improving Lives.

Okay, so you understand what Cloud Computing is and why it's important. Now you need to adapt the way your organization evaluates and procures IT services to the new realities of the cloud marketplace. This book presents the world's first comprehensive set of metrics designed specifically for evaluating cloud services. It is designed to be an invaluable resource for professionals in both IT and Procurement and combines existing leading practices from the sourcing world with the new approaches required for cloud. In addition to the metrics themselves, a wealth of templates, scoring guidelines, leading practices and examples are provided so that this tool can be put to use immediately for real-world decision making. For any service evaluation, from the most strategic partnerships down to simple one-off projects, it's time to start avoiding the potentially costly mistakes and false starts that have accompanied many of the early attempts to source the cloud. No one involved in selecting or procuring cloud services should be without it.

In this book you will learn how the public cloud is significantly changing the cost structures of digital business models and thus existing markets. The relationships between the cloud architectures used, the organization of the company and the price and business models that are possible as a result are shown clearly and so that they can be used in your own company. The authors explain how, one after the other, more and more markets are becoming digital markets and what role marginal costs play in this. They describe how cloud-based IT is disrupting classic IT. This enables small teams to build scalable business models worldwide at zero marginal costs with little investment. The economic effects are clearly illustrated using specific examples. In addition, technical laypeople get an overview of which factors are particularly important for the competitiveness of their digital business models and how managers can influence them. Finally, the book gives practitioners specific guidelines on how the cloud transformation can be carried out in their company. The book is aimed primarily at executives and employees in the specialist departments and IT who want to drive the cloud transformation in their companies. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition, Cloud-Transformation by Roland Frank, Gregor Schumacher and Andreas Tamm published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

Sustaining a competitive edge in today’s business world requires innovative approaches to product, service, and management systems design and performance. Advances in computing technologies have presented managers with additional challenges as well as further opportunities to enhance their business models. Business Transformation and Sustainability through Cloud System Implementation presents novel computing technologies designed for use in business and corporate environments, enabling managers and associates to make the most of the technologies at their disposal. This premier reference work seeks to alert firm management professionals and researchers to the potential risks and benefits associated with emerging technologies and guide firms on the proper selection, maintenance, and use of Web-based computing systems.

Cloud service benchmarking can provide important, sometimes surprising insights into the quality of services and leads to a more quality-driven design and engineering of complex software architectures that use such services. Starting with a broad introduction to the field, this book guides readers step-by-step through the process of designing, implementing and executing a cloud service benchmark, as well as understanding and dealing with its results. It covers all aspects of cloud service benchmarking, i.e., both benchmarking the cloud and benchmarking in the cloud, at a basic level. The book is divided into five parts: Part I discusses what cloud benchmarking is, provides an overview of cloud services and their key properties, and describes the notion of a cloud system and cloud-service quality. It also addresses the benchmarking lifecycle and the motivations behind running benchmarks in particular phases of an application lifecycle. Part II then focuses on benchmark design by discussing key objectives (e.g., repeatability, fairness, or understandability) and defining metrics and measurement methods, and by giving advice on developing own measurement methods and metrics. Next, Part III explores benchmark execution and implementation challenges and objectives as well as aspects like runtime monitoring and result collection. Subsequently, Part IV addresses benchmark results, covering topics such as an abstract process for turning data into insights, data preprocessing, and basic data analysis methods. Lastly, Part V concludes the book with a summary, suggestions for further reading and pointers to benchmarking tools available on the Web. The book is intended for researchers and graduate students of computer science and related subjects looking for an introduction to benchmarking cloud services, but also for industry practitioners who are interested in evaluating the quality of cloud services or who want to assess key qualities of their own implementations through cloud-based experiments.

For the last twenty years, we have witnessed how new technologies have changed organizations to adapt in order to compete or face nonexistence. This book will explain how cloud computing will be the most radical transformation of business processes every organization will face to date. Is cloud computing a strategic advantage? Cloud computing will reclassify service delivery models in ways that organizations have never seen before. IT organizations will become commoditized and in the center of the new business transformation. Is cloud computing about survival, or is it in pursuit of better values? Organizations who embrace this new ecosystem, adopting cloud computing and the mind-sets it personifies, will have guaranteed their existence. Organizations are leveraging the cloud to cut costs and deliver a better customer experience rapidly and consistently. But is it working? In this book, we discuss how cloud computing is commoditizing IT and if cloud computing is a real threat or an irresistible opportunity. How is cloud computing revolutionizing the financial industry and the way we conduct business? Part I we explain how to build a successful cloud computing strategy, and also share details of the survey results we conducted in my Ph.D. dissertation on cloud computing adoption models and the decision-making variables and factors that take place. Part II of the book is ideal for graduate students and doctoral candidates who are working on empirical academic research. We discuss the cloud computing adoption life cycle, theory of innovation diffusion, research questions, hypotheses, measurement instruments, the way that emotions drive technology adoption, and dependent and independent variables. Part III of the book includes relevant case study samples, beneficial for those who are looking for writing in an academic style and case study research. Who should read this book? This book is aimed at senior leadership and information technology (IT) professionals at all levels. Also, this is a book for IT graduate students, both MBA and doctoral, who seek to learn a great deal about emerging technologies and formal research methodologies.

The broad scope of Cloud Computing is creating a technology, business, sociolo- cal, and economic renaissance. It delivers the promise of making services available quickly with rather little effort. Cloud Computing allows almost anyone, anywhere, at anytime to interact with these service offerings. Cloud Computing creates a unique opportunity for its users that allows anyone with an idea to have a chance to deliver it to a mass market base. As Cloud Computing continues to evolve and penetrate different industries, it is inevitable that the scope and definition of Cloud Computing becomes very subjective, based on providers’ and customers’ persp- tive of applications. For instance, Information Technology (IT) professionals p- ceive a Cloud as an unlimited, on-demand, flexible computing fabric that is always available to support their needs. Cloud users experience Cloud services as virtual, off-premise applications provided by Cloud service providers. To an end user, a p- vider offering a set of services or applications in the Cloud can manage these off- ings remotely. Despite these discrepancies, there is a general consensus that Cloud Computing includes technology that uses the Internet and collaborated servers to integrate data, applications, and computing resources. With proper Cloud access, such technology allows consumers and businesses to access their personal files on any computer without having to install special tools. Cloud Computing facilitates efficient operations and management of comp- ing technologies by federating storage, memory, processing, and bandwidth.

Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers: From Distributed Computing to Cloudware Applications unravels the mystery of cloud computing and explains how it can transform the operating contexts of business enterprises. It provides a clear understanding of what cloud computing really means, what it can do, and when it is practical