Typically, when buying a car, there’s a sticker price that you agree to pay over time to drive it off the lot. Then there are a list of expenses required to keep the car on the road—monthly payments, licensing, maintenance, insurance, etc.
Just about any big purchase includes a lot more than just the sticker price. Smart buyers consider the price of the car along with available interest rates and terms. In some cases, a car might be priced higher but at a lower interest rate so that you could end up paying less in the long run. Insurance rates also vary depending on the type of car as well as the cost for routine maintenance that can be significantly higher for some vehicles.
All of these factors play a role in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a vehicle. Considering the price and interest rate as well as expenses can influence your decision. The TCO for any item you use regularly can have a huge impact on your life. If you buy a bigger house with more land and swimming pool, your TCO will obviously be much higher than for a more modest home. As the benefits are what you’re likely after, you might want to pay more for something realizing that the TCO is higher than another option.
Hybrid Cloud TCO
Similarly, for enterprise hybrid cloud initiatives, there’s going to be an initial cost for cloud resources and accompanying IT tools and processes based on a combination of one or more of the following: licensing fees, subscription rates, consumption rates, and metered usage.
Each cloud provider will have competitive rates to offer for various IT resources on a subscription basis, and then they’ll have costs for various enterprise IT tools associated with delivering and maintaining the consumption of these resources by end users.
For example, you might have a ticketing system like ServiceNow or Cherwell and enterprise monitoring from AppDynamics or Datadog. For backup and disaster recovery, you could be using Commvault or Veeam. There will be no shortage of complexity.
Some IT tools and Infrastructure or Software-as-a-Service (IaaS or SaaS) offerings will require customizations, training, and various levels of ongoing support. Cloud delivery and management software will be complementary and considered as part of the TCO for most enterprises. As you consider the complexity and the choices you have, consider these top-5 critical factors for TCO.
Top-5 Critical Factors for TCO
When considering any solution that becomes part of your IT resource investment in the cloud or on-premises, make sure you evaluate your choices based on a set of factors similar to the following:
- Implementation—This includes where and how the software solution is installed and maintained. In some cases, the architecture of the solution might require agents and services running from multiple nodes that require extra support. Take into account this more complex type of architecture compared to a lighter weight solution that might be implemented as SaaS or as an all-in-one virtual appliance.
- Training—The cost of training can include purchasing the training units themselves and the seat time to learn the material. Find out how the vendor suggests learning how to be proficient in using the software. Some solutions are more intuitive than others and might have enough online community support or very responsive technical support so that more formal training might be less of a need.
- Time to Value—This is an overlapping consideration based on the training, implementation and other factors related to the usability of the software. How long does it take to get the solution up and running? It might just be a matter of integrating secure, role-based access and the connection settings to various cloud providers and other complementary IT tools. In other cases, it could require a six-month engagement of professional services to get started. Both are equally valid depending on what you’re after for your hybrid cloud initiative.
- Extensibility—This includes the ability of the software to interoperate with other solutions with programmable access to other REST APIs along with any built-in support for the most common best-practice connections to cloud service providers and other IT tools. The idea is that if the solution does not automatically connect to another system, can it be easily programmed to do so? Likewise, does the solution itself have an API to be called by other systems?
- Upgrading—Because of the fast pace of digital innovation and new business requirements, technologies are being added and enhanced while new features are implemented everywhere in the digital ecosystem. A solution participating in this digital ecosystem must be able to keep up with changes and support any new and enhanced technologies as they emerge. Therefore, an upgrade process that occurs more frequently and is easy to achieve will contribute to a lower TCO.
Other factors to consider for TCO include the cost for Professional Services when necessary, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of Technical Support. CloudBolt as an enterprise hybrid cloud delivery and management solution has been purpose-built to make sure that all five of these factors affecting TCO are continually being addressed and prioritized for customers without compromise.
Want to see how CloudBolt can help you? Request a demo!
There’s an incredible amount of monitoring data in enterprise IT environments from the network, the infrastructure, and the applications. Consider that monitoring everything all the time for every aspect of your running infrastructure, although potentially useful, might not be a good use of time and resources. Strategic monitoring will lead to better outcomes in most cases.
Suppose a particular set of servers has the same load applied to it day after day and never reaches any level of saturation from CPU utilization or memory usage. Why invest any special monitoring for it if the servers are not causing issues? On the other hand, in an environment where demand fluctuates and the ability to scale up with that demand using more infrastructure, it’s important to know when a certain monitored threshold is reached. This will kick in load balancing or a horizontal scale of additional servers to handle the load.
Enterprises have the ability to strategically monitor with the many tools available to them.
Strategic Monitoring
Monitoring can be focused on 1) the infrastructure that runs applications and services of any kind, 2) the application as a whole from end-to-end, or 3) any combination of the two. Each of the monitoring tools available from enterprise favorites such as AppDynamics, New Relic, and Splunk will have a range of approaches that include deep statistics into the health of any component combined with some kind of predictive analytics that help pinpoint potential issues before they become costly problems. Logging can be done for any system and can be retrieved and analyzed for troubleshooting and insights.
Other monitoring tools, like Data Dog, Nagios, and Solarwinds, provide robust infrastructure and network metrics for IT operations that have enterprise-level visibility in order to facilitate smooth troubleshooting and alerting frameworks. Public cloud providers themselves include native monitoring of the infrastructure with an API to retrieve the necessary metrics for any reporting tool that can use them. For instance, CloudWatch metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) can easily be retrieved via an API and used for monitoring EC2 instances.
Strategic monitoring for hybrid cloud provisioning at the enterprise level is wide open for any IT administrator or DevOps engineer who needs to include monitoring with the provisioning process. The range of tools and the breadth of coverage is so open—any metric that you might need for the infrastructure running in production will most likely be armed with plenty of monitoring ability from one of your existing enterprise tools. There’s no need to collect it again with another tool or instrument your provisioned infrastructure with another agent at the time of provisioning unless that is part of your strategy.
Much of hybrid cloud provisioning involves setting up ready-made application stacks for developers to use as a starting point to develop the environment further with software coding along with digital business logic that they need to ultimately run in production. Monitoring might be better addressed later on in the full lifecycle of this infrastructure. In other cases, the hybrid cloud provisioning could be deploying production-ready web servers, app servers, or instances of fully developed containerization. In this case, monitoring can be included in the blueprint for whatever downstream enterprise tool will be used to track and monitor that resource. Another provisioning process might be for lab environments identical to customer or user environments where developers want to access the resources for a given amount of time and then turn them off when not in use. There might be no need for enterprise-grade monitoring in this case.
All of your hybrid cloud provisioning processes will require a strategic approach to monitoring that is gets the right, actionable monitoring data that suits the workflow.
CloudBolt provides monitoring of usage statistics to help control costs and manage infrastructure by department or group usage. When a particular user or sets of users start to consume beyond a level set by their quota, action can be taken to approve or deny more resources. You can monitor server utilization statistics from VMware Servers and AWS EC2 instances out-of-the-box and configure integration with any existing monitoring system on the network that is relevant to your strategic hybrid cloud provisioning plan.
Want to see how CloudBolt can help you? Request a demo!