The impact of cloud infrastructure on business value: A qualitative analysis

Abstract

The interpretation of organizations like dynamic entities imposes some fundamental challenges for today’s managers. Firms have not derived value simply by linking IT to their business processes: they have learned how to benefit from IT by developing a competency in creating and evolving an IT architecture, able to identify and implement the organization’s strategic objectives. Cloud computing represents a possible answer to companies’ needs of flexibility, giving them the chance to implement new services more quickly than the past and without expensive capital investments. The aim of this work is to analyze the impact of cloud (in short, from now on the term “Cloud” will be used as “Cloud Computing”) on value creation opportunities for companies that decide to migrate their IT infrastructure toward the on-demand model. The assumption that similar choices, from a technological point of view, can imply various value expectations has been attested through the cross-analysis of two companies that both chose public cloud, but starting from deeply different motivations.