Portal and Cloudonomics sense
We hope we have given the reader the tools to look into the various possible adoptions of cloud computing in relation to portal initiatives. There are ways to look into the pain versus gain and cost benefit of such claim that "cloud computing can be viewed as a means of reducing cost, increasing revenue, improving business agility, and enhancing the total customer experience". Joe Weinman from www.cloudonomics.com coined the term "Cloudonomics" and laid out 10 laws and formulae to contextualize the value created by cloud computing. They could be used to look at your own portal and gauge the benefits of cloud computing.
To simplify, let's look at first five ones that made the business case for A2Z portal in the cloud, and how the ROI is measured against these items as follows:
Law no. 1 — Utility services cost less even though they cost more: The "Value of Utility in the Cloud" (simulation) enables assessment of different provisioning intervals and their resulting costs in light of the demand function." That means a good cloud estimation model can show hybrid, shared, dedicated cloud patterns, and the overall cost benefit of outsourcing your cloud to a provider versus creating and managing your own enterprise cloud. Besides, this can take into account how the pay-per-use model (as opposed to just on demand) can help us build a financial case.
Law No. 2 — On-demand trumps forecasting: "The ability to provision capacity rapidly means that any unexpected demand can be serviced, and the revenue associated with it captured. The ability to rapidly deprovision capacity means that companies don't need to pay good money for nonproductive assets". So, if the portal utilization growth rate is linear versus exponential, the value of the cloud utility exercise can help us define the capacity provisioning approach based on the estimated or known growth patterns.
Law No. 3 — The peak of the sum is never greater than the sum of the peaks: Under this strategy, the total capacity deployed is the sum of these individual peaks. However, as clouds can reallocate resources across many enterprises with different peak periods, a cloud needs to deploy less capacity. So, let's say that in the banking domain (unlike tax businesses are concerned about April 15th, a retailer with Black Friday, a broadcaster with Super Bowl) due to the dynamic nature of its business, A2Z Bank used the cloud to manage the sum of the peaks and the peak of the sum, as metal and bullion markets vary on a daily basis on the different world markets.
Law No. 4 — Aggregate demand is smoother than individual: These two laws (3 and 4) are related in that value of aggregation and the value of resource pooling for peaks. They point out that economies of scale can apply cloud to its problems.
Law No. 5 — Average unit costs are reduced by distributing fixed costs over more units of output: So in other words, A2Z Bank took into consideration demand patterns for both new bullion banking business and call center operations when deciding on the benefits of cloud computing for its enterprise portal solution.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be highly beneficial to portal applications for server, networking, data center, storage functionality, and the scalability. These are foundational and business critical infrastructures, which require the most flexibility to stay operational within the expected service-level agreements. There are, however, other business drivers as follows:
Reduced capital expenditures and labor costs for portal and overall IT.
Fast provisioning and deprovisioning of services to be exposed or consumed by portal.
Elastic resource pooling as computing resources are pooled to serve multiple capabilities. It fosters dynamic allocation and entitlement of virtual and physical resources based on service-level agreements, as well as on changing demand.
Superior service management with visibility, control, and automation across IT and business services. One of the main portal challenges is around having this visibility around portal services.
A plethora of possible portal deployment choices over the cloud, behind the firewall or as an integrated service delivery platform make it even more appealing.
The fact of the matter is that portal is an entry point to content, data, information services; and its performance and availability directly depends on the availability of all the services associated to it. Furthermore, cloud computing as a technology paradigm is only viable because that technology offers many benefits to business organizations deploying business solutions as follows:
Optimized development systems resources to keep portal developers productive. Portal development environments can become complex and expensive to create and maintain.
Reduced capital and licensing expenses portal efforts. They can be as much as 50 to 75 percent due to the on-demand provisioning of virtualized test resources via a test cloud.
Decreased portal operating and labor costs as much as 30 to 50 percent by automated provisioning and configuration of portal test environments. Portal application deployments and environment build-outs and configuration can be unique and prone to errors if not automated.
Improved quality by reducing defects that result from faulty portal configurations as much as 15 to 30 percent.
