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CCC-A: Cloud Adoption and Business Value

CCC-A · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Cloud Adoption and Business Value

What this domain tests

Cloud Adoption and Business Value tests whether you can build and critique a business case, compare total cost of ownership (TCO) with return on investment (ROI), select migration strategies, and explain value beyond cost reduction. Expect scenario questions about capex-to-opex shifts, speed to market, and FinOps.

Core rules

  • Cloud commonly shifts spending from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, but adoption itself can require capital: migration, training, and re-architecture are often upfront costs.
  • TCO must include compute, storage, network egress, support, backup, disaster recovery, migration, training, and decommissioning. Compare fully loaded on-premises costs, including power, cooling, space, hardware refresh, and staff.
  • Value drivers include agility and faster provisioning, elasticity, global reach, resilience, and access to managed services. Cost is one dimension, not the whole case.
  • Common migration strategies are rehost, replatform, refactor or re-architect, repurchase, retain, and retire. Choose per workload, not as a blanket policy.
  • FinOps practices make cloud spend visible and accountable through tagging, budgets, forecasts, and showback or chargeback.

Worked example

An on-premises three-year TCO is $120,000: hardware $60,000, power and cooling $20,000, administration $40,000. A cloud option is $86,000: compute $45,000, storage $12,000, support $9,000, migration $15,000, training $5,000, plus $6,000 egress, totaling $92,000. Direct savings are $28,000 over three years. The team also moves provisioning from two weeks to two hours, enabling a project to start one quarter earlier. The business case should present both the $28,000 savings and the quantified time-to-market benefit, then state assumptions about utilization and growth.

Traps that cost marks

  • Comparing an hourly virtual machine price with a fully loaded on-premises cost. Include power, staff, refresh, and facilities.
  • Ignoring egress, support, backup, and migration costs.
  • Claiming cloud is always cheaper. Steady, highly utilized workloads can be cheaper on-premises.
  • Treating operating expenditure as no upfront cost. Migration and skills development can be capital-like.
  • Presenting cost savings as business value without linking them to revenue, risk, or speed.