Economic Implications PROJECT 1 University of Maryland Global Campus CCA 610 9040 Cloud Services and Technologies

PROJECT 1 – ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS 2 BallotOnline is an online organization that provides voting solutions on a global scale. BallotOnline is experiencing rapid growth but is reaching its max capabilities for their onpremises IT infrastructure. It may be time to take our organization and move our infrastructure to a public cloud. There are many capabilities of the cloud that could be beneficial to the organization, but this analysis will focus on the cost savings, the financial benefits the cloud offers, and how the cloud can solve BallotOnline’s problem and help manage their IT budget. The IT budget is determined by executive leadership which is based on revenue projections for the year. The current IT budget of BallotOnline is 10% of their revenue ($100.8 million) which equates to $10.8 million. The IT budget of the current year can be broken down and allocated as such: $4 million of the $10.8 million budget is allocated towards capital expenses, which are expenses related to data center hardware purchases (which is the physical equipment). $800,000 is allocated to operational expenses, which are expenses that are related to support and maintenance expenses. Lastly, $6 million is allocated to general operational expenses, which are expenses related to data center colocation fees (space, power, cooling, software, etc.). One major benefit of moving to the cloud is the complete removal of capital expenses as all the physical hardware and resource are provided by the cloud provider. Taking that into consideration the organization will already save $4 million on the IT budget due to not having any capital expenditures. Executive leadership of BallotOnline has a projected growth for revenue, the IT budget, and the on-prem IT infrastructure over the next 5 years. BallotOnline is looking to pull in $225 million in revenue by the fifth year with an IT budget of $11.5 million (for the year) all while running a proposed 2000 physical servers and network dev