EVACS: Economic Value Assessment of Cloud Sourcing by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Haselmann Till, Vossen Gottfried

Abstract
While cloud computing is widely advertised as a "silver bullet" for manyIT-related troubles of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) because it can potentiallylead to many attractive cost-savings, most enterprises struggle with creatingappropriate business cases to support these claims. One major problem is that theeffort - and, thus, cost - required to fairly evaluate a cloud sourcing solution is simplytoo high for a typical SME, partly due to the fact that even appropriate decisionprocesses and assessment methods need to be developed. In this paper, we proposea generalized method to assess the economic value of cloud sourcing called EVACS,that facilitates the identification of valuable cloud sourcing projects for SMEs. Wealso present a cost-benefit framework that helps speeding up the process of building adetailed business case by outlining relevant decision factors.

Keywords
Cloud services; cloud usage; small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); economic value; cost and benefit analysis