1) Is your business scenario vertical? Ideal cloud computing candidates include "a single business process or a small number of processes with consistent requirements, which can be considered as a single set." In other words, these are processes that can easily be migrated from a single business unit to a centralized demand set, such as moving human resources or marketing tasks to cloud applications.
2) Is there competitive differentiation in the process? You might have ways to attract customers to achieve the highest satisfaction ratings in your industry. Or you might be able to produce products of higher quality and lower cost than existing ones. Can the technology supporting these processes be efficiently replaced? The authors of the Open Organization suggest that if a business process is a key differentiator for the business, you need to check whether the process will be isolated due to changes in technology when deciding if the cloud is a good candidate.
3) Is the differentiation based on IT? If some of your company's secrets are embedded in the code of applications or systems, such as sub-second response times that competitors haven't yet achieved, then the cloud may not be a good candidate.
4) Are there barriers to outsourcing? From the perspective of intent and purpose, the cloud is essentially a form of outsourcing. The barriers to adopting the cloud are the same as those that prohibit traditional outsourcing, such as internal services that cannot rely on external providers; long-term leases; transfer costs; fixed asset depreciation; immature business architecture; corporate culture; geographic sovereignty rules (especially in the EU); industry standards; compliance audit rules; and even labor contracts. Paying attention to compliance is particularly important because it relates to information security—you need to know who is handling the information and how it is being handled.
5) Are there obstacles to adopting the cloud? Most of the barriers to outsourcing also apply to the cloud. Barriers specific to the cloud include highly customized resources; for example, enterprise authorization; policy restrictions related to resource sharing or configuration change control; too few potential customers; and unacceptable service level agreements (SLAs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs) provided by cloud vendors.
6) Are the main business drivers compatible with the cloud? Business drivers compatible with the cloud include the need to reduce total cost of ownership over the medium to long term; improve cash flow; shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure; access functionality or domain expertise; or become a cloud provider yourself. Business drivers incompatible with the cloud may include the need to cut short-term costs; increase capacity without third-party financing; or change tax status (identify depreciation, create job incentives, etc.) or transform fixed assets (which can be done through leasing).
7) Is the application decoupled from changes in business processes? Business logic should be separated from underlying technology. As the authors of the Open Organization put it: "Business personnel without application knowledge should be able to modify the definition of business processes without affecting the ability of application administrators to effectively manage and maintain the application."
8) Is the cloud solution a platform? Transforming the solution layer beneath business processes and applications into a standard, shared configuration for delivering all of the company’s IT services could be an excellent case for cloud computing. The solution layer typically includes middleware, operating systems, hardware, and data center infrastructure.
9) Are the hardware, operating system, and applications custom-built or proprietary? Harding and his co-authors state: "If the hardware, operating system, and application layers are all custom-built, then a cloud solution may not meet the requirements well." The cloud may also not be suitable for handling legacy IT solutions. Only when all elements involved (hardware, operating systems, or application layers) are not based on custom technology can the cloud potentially be a viable method.