CIO Talk Radio Blog

One of the most difficult items to forecast for new IT investment is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model.  Calculating TCO was never easy for purchased on-premise software or hardware packages, but it is more complicated for cloud computing solutions. You'll hear various vendors talk about turning capital expense into operating expense, where on-premise software is a capital expense purchase, and cloud computing is an operating expense.  However, this is overly simplistic. To truly evaluate the TCO of a cloud computing investment you need to look at the following categories of spending.