Investment and return on investment in the cloud.

INCREASED AGILITY. FASTER time-to-market. Increased business value.

Phrases like these pepper cloud computing marketing literature. Cloud computing concepts are more focused on IT as a business enabler than on simply making IT cost less. But that doesn't mean the need for financial justification is thrown out of the window even if 'soft costs' play a bigger role than in other cases.

How you think about cloud computing investments will vary depending upon the type of project you undertake. For example, the use of public cloud resources such as those offered by Amazon is often about trading today's lower CAPEX for potentially higher OPEX tomorrow. This reality needs to be recognised in any financial analysis.

But let's focus instead on the investments and benefits associated with building a private or hybrid cloud. In some respects, this looks a lot more like a traditional in-house IT project. You're buying software and possibly hardware, integrating …