When organisations evaluate a move to the cloud, conversations often revolve around costs, control, or vendor preference. But without a clear framework to assess the strategic trade-offs, decisions tend to be reactive or incomplete. Ten years ago, while working on my MSc dissertation, I developed what I called the Cloud Value Proposition Model—a visual tool to help compare deployment options (from private cloud to SaaS) across dimensions like agility, cost, responsibility, and vendor lock-in.
This article revisits that model, explains its purpose, and explores how it can support real-world cloud strategy conversations—particularly when business and IT need to align on direction.
Explaining the Cloud Value Proposition Model
The model breaks down cloud deployment options and maps them against eight key dimensions:
Cloud Deployment Scenarios
The model presents a range of cloud deployment scenarios, progressing from left to right across increasing levels of abstraction and service responsibility. These range from fully owned environments to vendor-managed solutions:
- Private Cloud – on-premises, own hardware
- Private Cloud – off-premises, own hardware
- Private Cloud – off-premises, vendor hardware
- Public Cloud – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Public Cloud – Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Public Cloud – Software as a Service (SaaS)
Rather than forcing a binary choice between “cloud” and “on-prem,” this model highlights a spectrum of control, responsibility, and agility—helping stakeholders understand the trade-offs at each stage of the cloud journey.
Strategic Dimensions
To make those trade-offs more explicit, the model compares each scenario across eight strategic dimensions:
- Agile Development – cloud enables faster iteration and deployment. On-prem setups tend to slow down release cycles due to infrastructure constraints.
- Cost – cloud offers flexible, usage-based pricing. On-prem demands upfront investment.
- Economies of Scale – cloud providers optimise resources at massive scale, reducing per-unit cost through automation and shared infrastructure. On-prem setups lack this structural efficiency and scale advantage.
- Elasticity – cloud adjusts to demand in real time. On-prem needs upfront capacity planning and often runs under- or overutilised.
- Flexibility – on-prem gives full control to customise, integrate, or pivot. Cloud services limit options to what providers expose.
- Responsibility – on-prem means full control—and full accountability—across the stack. Cloud shifts responsibility to the provider, reducing operational burden but limiting control.
- Security Issues – Public cloud increases visibility to attackers, but benefits from stronger defences. Private setups are lower profile but often more vulnerable.
- Vendor Lock-In – cloud platforms can limit portability. On-prem gives more freedom to change providers or architectures.
Each row in the model reflects a strategic trade-off. For example, as you move from Private Cloud to SaaS, agility and elasticity generally increase—but so does vendor lock-in. At the same time, operational responsibility shifts away from your internal team, which might be a strength or a risk depending on your context. Private Cloud is the opposite: high responsibility, high control, but limited elasticity and slower time-to-value.
Interpreting the Trade-Offs
The model isn’t meant to tell you what to do. It’s meant to surface the right conversations. Are you prepared to give up control in exchange for speed? Does your team have the capabilities to manage infrastructure, or is that better outsourced? Is cost predictability more important than long-term flexibility?
The goal isn’t to crown a winner. It’s to help teams align on what trade-offs matter most to the business.
Using the Model in Practice
This model is meant to be used ideally at the start of any cloud transformation or platform decision. In practice, it works best when teams are evaluating competing options and need a structured way to surface their priorities. For example:
- IT sees IaaS as ideal for flexibility and control
- Finance wants SaaS to simplify costs and reduce overhead
- Security raises red flags about data sovereignty and compliance risks
Instead of letting these perspectives talk past each other, the Cloud Value Proposition Model helps clarify what each trade-off entails. It brings the conversation back to shared understanding—not technical preference or stakeholder bias.
It also serves as a useful sanity check for existing cloud strategies:
Are you over-indexed on agility but blind to lock-in? Over-invested in control but bottlenecked on scale?
You don’t need to assign scores or build a matrix. The point is to ask better questions, surface assumptions, and align on direction.
Use Case Tip
If you’re working on a cloud migration plan and getting different answers from IT, finance, and product teams—this model helps surface why. You’re not misaligned on facts—you’re operating from different priorities.
Where This Sits Among Other Models
The Cloud Value Proposition Model isn’t the only framework out there—nor is it meant to be. But it fills a gap in the early strategic phase of cloud decision-making, where alignment is often missing.
Other models serve different purposes:
- AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) is useful when decisions must be formally justified or audited. It uses weighted scoring and pairwise comparisons, but can be time-consuming and overly rigid for fast-moving projects.
- Workload-based frameworks—like the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment, Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, or Gartner’s 5Rs—help assess how specific applications should be migrated. They’re excellent for tactical planning, but typically assume the cloud is a given and focus less on why.
What this model offers is a strategic first-pass lens. It’s designed to spark conversations, not calculate outcomes. It helps stakeholders step back and consider: What trade-offs are we actually making? And are we solving the right problem in the first place?
Used alongside other models, it can set the foundation for more granular assessments and architectural decisions to follow.
Final Thoughts
The Cloud Value Proposition Model was created to make cloud decisions more deliberate, not more complicated. It’s a tool for surfacing priorities, clarifying assumptions, and aligning business and IT around what truly matters—not just what’s trendy or convenient. Like any model, it’s a simplification. It doesn’t account for every edge case, nor does it reflect the full maturity of today’s cloud ecosystem—after all, it was first developed several years ago. But even now, many organisations still struggle with the same fundamental questions it was designed to address.
In a future article, I’ll revisit this model with a more critical lens—exploring where it holds up, where it’s aged, and how real-world cloud adoption has challenged some of its original assumptions. For now, if your cloud strategy conversations feel like they’re talking past each other, this model might be a good place to start.