Key performance indicators

The key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure goal attainment. Advance agreement on the relevance of the following cloud computing KPIs can assist in solution/business alignment:

  • Time:
    • Availability versus recovery SLA: Indicator of availability performance compared to current levels
    • Timeliness: Degree of service responsiveness, which can be used to indicate rapidity of service choice determination
    • Throughput: Transaction latency or the volume per unit of time throughput which measures workload efficiency
    • Periodicity: Frequency of demand and supply activity or the amplitude of the demand and supply activity
    • Temporal: The event frequency to real-time action and outcome result
  • Cost:
    • Workload-predictable cost: Indicator of CAPEX cost of on-premises ownership versus cloud
    • Workload-variable cost: Indicator of OPEX cost for on-premises ownership versus cloud
    • CAPEX versus OPEX cost: Indicator of on-premises physical asset TCO versus cloud TCO
    • Server consolidation ratio: Ratio of servers in legacy infrastructure to the number used in the cloud infrastructure
    • Workload versus utilization percentage: Indicator of cost-effective cloud workload utilization
  • Workload type allocations:
    • Workload size versus memory/processor distribution: Measures percentage of IT asset workloads using cloud
    • Instance to asset ratio: Measures percentage and cost of IT consolidation
    • Degree of complexity reduction (%): Measures the number of guest operating system instances versus the number of physical resource assets
    • Tenancy to instance ratio: Measures tenants per resource, which measures CPU and memory utilization
    • Ecosystem (supply chain) optionality: Tracks the use of commodity assets used to deliver company services after the function is migrated to a CSP
  • Quality:
    • Experiential—the quality of the perceived user experience of the service
    • Basic quality of service metrics (availability, reliability, recoverability, responsiveness, throughput, manageability, security)
    • User satisfaction
    • Customer retention
    • Revenue efficiencies
  • Margin increase per unit revenue:
    • Rate of increase of annuity income
    • SLA response error rate
    • Frequency of defective responses
    • Intelligent automation—the level of automated response (agent)
  • Margin:
    • Revenue efficiencies—ability to generate margin increase per revenue.
    • Rate of annuity improvement
    • Market disruption rate—rate of revenue growth versus rate of new product customer acquisition