The Cloud Service Evaluation Handbook

Okay, so you understand what Cloud Computing is and why it's important. Now you need to adapt the way your organization evaluates and procures IT services to the new realities of the cloud marketplace. This book presents the world's first comprehensive set of metrics designed specifically for evaluating cloud services. It is designed to be an invaluable resource for professionals in both IT and Procurement and combines existing leading practices from the sourcing world with the new approaches required for cloud. In addition to the metrics themselves, a wealth of templates, scoring guidelines, leading practices and examples are provided so that this tool can be put to use immediately for real-world decision making. For any service evaluation, from the most strategic partnerships down to simple one-off projects, it's time to start avoiding the potentially costly mistakes and false starts that have accompanied many of the early attempts to source the cloud. No one involved in selecting or procuring cloud services should be without it.
About the Author: Scott Feuless is a single father of two living in Pearland, Texas and is one of the world's foremost experts on the measurement and evaluation of cloud services. Thus far there has only been one major effort to create a standard for measurement and evaluation of cloud services targeted at service buyer organizations. This was the Cloud Services Measurement Initiative Consortium (CSMIC), and Scott was the primary author of the metrics for that standard. Though the consortium eventually dissolved before the standard could be completed, he has leveraged his experience to build a new, complete, user-friendly metrics framework, complete with the templates and guidance required to put it to use in real-world decision-making. Organizations making business-critical cloud sourcing decisions can now rest assured that their decisions are leveraging reliable, comprehensive metrics and leading practices. As cloud services rapidly become more critical to organizations across the world, reliable metrics are key to optimizing the benefits those services will deliver. Scott currently sits on the Cloud Metrics Subgroup of the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture Working Group and occasionally blogs on cloud computing topics. He spent 15 years at ISG, the world's leading sourcing advisory firm, where he advised many of the world's largest organizations on cloud service adoption, sourcing, benchmarking and performance improvement. During this time Scott was ISG's leading expert on cloud service measurement, inventing key tools for cloud service evaluation and cloud service pricing analytics. His extensive work with sophisticated benchmarking models, combined with input from clients beginning their journey into cloud computing, gave him just the background he needed to design effective, usable metrics for evaluating cloud services. Scott's work with cloud computing began in 1999 when he helped transform a small Value Added Reseller into a publicly traded startup Application Service Provider (ASP) named ebaseOne. As the firm's Chief Technology Officer, he managed the business plan, hired the technical staff, developed customer agreements, worked with initial customers to design the services and much more. That ASP model is now more commonly known as Software as a Service (SaaS), one of the most popular forms of cloud computing.