Claudio Giovanoli

A Cloud Readiness Assessment Framework for Enterprise Content Management and Social Software (E-Collaboration) in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that offers opportunities for organisations to hire precisely those ICT services they need (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS). Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can benefit a lot from software services that are managed in a professional way. Cloud computing enables them to overcome restrictions from low budgets and limited resources for ICT. However, cloud adoption is challenging and requires a clear cloud roadmap. Organisations lack knowledge of cloud computing and are usually challenged by the adoption of cloud services. In most cases, SMEs do not know what aspects they have to take into consideration for a sound decision in favour or against the cloud. A cloud readiness assessment is a general approach to facilitate this decision-making process. The presented study focuses on the development of an assessment framework for cloud services (SaaS) in the domain of enterprise content management (ECM) and social software (e-collaboration).

Cloud Computing Business Case Framework: Introducing a Mixed-Model Business Case Framework for Small and Medium Enterprises to Determine the Value of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is still at the top of the agenda of almost every company. The market for cloud services grew consistently over the last year and is expected to continue to rise over the next few years. To justify the investment, companies need to carefully evaluate the costs, benefits and risks of cloud services and create a compelling business case. The formation of a strong case for an investment decision about cloud services presents two primary challenges for small and medium enterprises. Companies often cannot compare the true costs of different services since they do not know the current costs of their IT-systems and do not include all the cost factors of cloud services within their calculations. Secondly, it is difficult to include all the intangible benefits and risks of cloud services within the business case, as they are not possible to quantify or hardly quantifiable. A framework for the cloud business case based on the current state of the art literature can help to overcome those challenges by creating awareness for all relevant factors and defining a suitable business case method.

FHNW Maturity Models for Cloud and Enterprise IT

Existing cloud maturity models define the level of maturity according to the number of cloud solutions implemented or the duration of deployment. However, this does not include the motivation regarding why cloud solutions are used in an enterprise. Likewise, there has been no investigated into what changes the deployment of cloud services entails, how enterprise IT positions itself and whether the enterprise is able to bring about the necessary changes to support them. The combination of the FHNW Cloud and Enterprise IT Maturity Models provides information regarding why and how the cloud is used and how the enterprise IT is set up. As a result, the two maturity models support enterprises that already use the cloud on the way to making them even more efficient, to having their business IT aligned, and to contributing significantly to the successful digital transformation.

How Cloud Will Transform the Retail Banking Industry

This paper focusses on current trends in the banking industry and on illustrating how these trends can be supported by cloud computing. The main characteristics of cloud computing that could support transformation are facilitated data accessibility, enabled processing of data from various sources and the opportunity of an easier integration of functions or data. Trends in the banking industry are increasing customer centricity, redesigning of branches and deployment of new communication and distribution channels. For each trend we report quotes general information to provide an overview of the transformation caused by this trend. We identify which business processes are influenced, how they are affected and we explain how cloud computing could support the identified changes.

Profile Based Service Selection for Cloud Brokering Systems with a Focus on SaaS

Cloud Service Brokerage systems are still in an early stage and mostly do not satisfy the existing demand of Cloud Consumers and Cloud Providers. An important aspect of Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) Systems is to locate services as per the requirements of a Cloud Consumer. In the wide and varied world of Cloud Services, every single service varies according to technical aspects, specifications, limitations and much more. Locating a suitable service means the consumer needs to compare various services, know all specifications related to his service and make a choice. The next generation of Cloud Service Brokerage systems will be expected to make it easier to make choices and comparison. In this paper we propose improvements on the process of finding a service within the Cloud Brokering Systems by using an innovative approach towards profiling the IT and Cloud services of an Enterprise Customer.