Cost–benefit analysis – evaluation model of cloud computing deployment for use in companies

The use of cloud computing services appears to offer significant cost advantages. The most frequently mentioned advantages include investment and operating costs saving, high elasticity of services as well as increased flexibility of certain business processes. On the other hand, the adoption of cloud computing in enterprise environments is non-trivial. Understanding the organizational benefits and drawbacks is far from straightforward. The adoption of cloud computing results in a considerable amount of organizational change that will affect employees. The aim of this contribution is to conduct and describe the evaluation model of cloud computing that would be applicable in business practice for evaluating the effectiveness of such investments. The target users of this model are primarily people in companies with decision-making power in the investment field. The appropriate starting point based on the multi-criteria evaluation was the cost–benefit analysis (CBA) approach for cloud computing (CC). A multi-method approach (systematic literature review, analysis of real cloud computing services, expert interview, case study) was applied in order to develop and evaluate the formal model. We found that our model fits the practical requirements and supports decision-making in cloud computing.