1. Cost effectiveness
   1. How cost effective is cloud computing compared to on-site IT infratructures?
      1. Will a company see monetary returns on investment?
   2. How efficient will the cloud run incomparison to an on-site IT infratstructure?
   3. Which companies would benefit more from cloud computing?
      1. Schools?
      2. Public sector?
      3. Government agencies?
   4. Renting cloud usage
2. Laws and Governance
   1. Which countries offer better legal protection?
   2. Who owns the intellectual data on the service provider's hardware?
      1. Company A - The service provider?
      2. Company B - The purchaser of the service?
3. Ease of administration
   1. How do the administrators connect to the service?
      1. VPN?
   2. How do administrators/technicians add new software or services?
      1. Free reign of the server
      2. Service provider develops and installs software
   3. How long does it take to install a new piece of software?
   4. Can a cloud be easily incorporated to an on-site infrastructure for purposes such as data simulation?
      1. Example: Astonomical data simulations
         1. http://scicasts.com/computing/1834-high-performance-computing/2500-researchers-harness-cloud-computing-for-data-intensive-research-on-oceans-and-galaxies-
4. Energy consumption
   1. Which uses the most energy?
      1. Physical server sprawl (20+ servers)?
      2. Cloud?
      3. SAN?
   2. Does using a shared-cloud space increase the energy saving from all companies that use the shared cloud?
      1. If this is the case: Do any of the companies reap the benefits of the energy that is being saved?
      2. If this is the case: Will the cloud service provider create monetary savings for the companies?
      3. AKA Multi-tenancy
   3. Energy saving incentives?
      1. Green league of companies
      2. Green awards
      3. Merits of recognition?
5. Metrics
   1. What service levels are expected?
      1. Overall uptime
      2. Expected service level percentage
   2. How expandable is the cloud's bandwidth in response to network load?
      1. What are the charges if bandwidth requires expansion?
         1. How much for a temporary increase (1-5 days)?
         2. How much for a short period of time (0-30 days)
            1. Example: Company testing/trialling new software
         3. How much for a long period of time? (0-6 months)
            1. Example: Zebra Finance seasonal influxes in business (Football Ticket Finance)
      2. Why would a company need to expand their cloud limit and usage?
   3. How fast will the cloud's bandwidth expand?
      1. Potential loss of earning or research?
6. Security
   1. What security measures are put in place by the cloud service provider?
      1. Tunneling?
   2. Will the cloud service use public connections or private connections?
7. Topology/Infrastructure
   1. Redundancy?
8. As-a-Service
   1. Hardware-as-a-service
   2. Software-as-a-service
   3. Infrastructure-as-a-service
   4. Platform-as-a-service
9. Vendors
   1. Microsoft Cloud Services
      1. Microsoft Exchange
      2. Microsoft SharePoint
      3. Microsoft Dynamics CRM