Quantify Business Value

In addition to understanding cloud usage and cost, organizations must also develop an understanding of how that cost maps to the value cloud creates for the organization and its stakeholders.

This Domain connects usage with business value to ensure the value created and impact of that usage are transparently within expectations. Organizations map cloud usage and associated cost metrics to budgets, use historical information and future plans to forecast, establish and measure KPIs and other performance indicators, and perform benchmarking between teams and with other organizations. Organizations should consider both costs and value in the cloud in monetary terms, in terms of sustainability, and in the context of traditional IT or organizational performance metrics like application availability, reliability, or customer satisfaction.

The Capabilities in this Domain involve activities that look at spending trends, set baselines and budgets, estimate, plan and then forecast in order to help understand if spending is expected, and at a level that allows an organization to meet its objectives.

When spending is well understood, that information can be quantified to determine value for cloud spending and enable timely decision making.