GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

There’s a certain set of metrics around such things as hardware and software licensing costs, power and energy costs and operations costs that we would expect agencies to consider to see what cost savings they would make by going to the cloud. Then they need to look deeper into the data center to see what the current utilization rates are for servers and storage and how those might be affected.

Soft costs such as flexibility need to be considered also. Because you don’t know what the future will bring, you need to look into the future and gauge what requirements will be three to five years out. But if you guess high you’ll spend too much money, and if you guess low you won’t have the scalability and you’ll have to retrofit for that later. The cloud provides elasticity and flexibility that won’t necessarily be there if agencies build it themselves.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

ROI calculations are easy for measuring such things as IT resource savings, bandwidth consumption and administrative overhead. These are quantifiable costs that can be classified and therefore calculated using various tools currently in the market. However, it’s a different matter when you try to calculate for qualitative measurements such as the loss of an agency’s brand or citizens’ trust when a capability becomes unavailable.  For example, when the FBI or Department of Homeland Security websites go down and are unavailable to field agents or citizens during a crisis. It is critical for agencies to evaluate what those subjective costs are, and to ensure services are in place that minimize such risks. With that said, ROI is just one measurement that agencies need to consider. First and foremost agency’s must determine if cloud computing can help them complete their mission in a timely and economical fashion.  Nothing is going to replace the mission; that is job number one.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

It’s largely a matter of the difference between the costs today, and the cost in going to a cloud environment.

And while that seems logical, one of the issues not considered often is the cost associated in transitioning from your current environment to a cloud environment. Even if I put my current email system in a public cloud, I still have to transition the data, and decide how to manage attachments, whether I’m going to have a help desk and so on. What cost impact will that have? And then you must consider security.

But there’s also hidden value when we take a full lifecycle approach, that not only factors in the in the cost of the startup and the cost of the transition, but also takes into account the value of faster development times. With the cloud you can develop applications faster, so you have to determine the ROI if I can deliver a cloud application in six weeks versus six months or six years? What’s the value to my end customers in having that improved service?