Moving to the cloud will save you money!
This is a prevailing myth about cloud costs. You see, making savings is not automatic. But selectively moving workloads to the cloud can help. A well-executed cloud cost management strategy is the only way to save on costs. Today, we’ll go over some of the common myths and misunderstandings surrounding cloud costs.
1. Cloud is Always Cheaper
The cloud is not always cheaper than an on-premises deployment. The costs usually depend on the organization’s goals and requirements. If you need high uptime and resiliency, then it might make financial sense to move to the cloud. While you could always build resiliency and uptime into your on-premises deployment, it can end up costing a fortune. Your best choice is to go with the cloud and employ a sound cloud cost management strategy.
2. Value and Cost Are the Same Things
Cloud ROI can be tough to calculate. It’s even worse because uptime SLAs are very different between on-premises and cloud deployments. It’s almost impossible to make an apples-to-apples comparison. But this shouldn’t discourage enterprises from determining the actual costs of their cloud setups.
Value could mean that the business is achieving its goals on the cloud. Most times, cloud use is better measured by its value to the business rather than actual dollar costs. Value and costs aren’t the same things. But value could come in the form of lower costs. To determine ROI, start with a cost-benefit analysis to ensure the cloud strategy is delivering value to the business. While it might be expensive to be on the cloud, new opportunities have opened up that were, until now, unavailable.
For example, productivity and revenue increase should be commensurate with the size of your cloud deployment. While you may not be saving money, you’re reducing costs in relation to revenue.
3. Compute is the Only Cloud Cost
Too often, enterprises focus only on compute costs. Then, they are stunned when the cloud bill arrives. The reality is, computing power is seldom the only cost of running your cloud. Cloud costs are an aggregate of all the services you use for your cloud deployment. It’s easy to forget the ancillary services that make up your applications. You have to factor in storage, backups, monitoring, and other services. These services are separate billing items. This is the reason why cloud projects always seem to run over budget.
4. It’s Easy to Read and Understand Cloud Bills
Understanding your spending on the cloud can be tough. Most times, you’ll not see a dollar figure that immediately makes sense. Deciphering the contents of a cloud invoice can be challenging to the untrained eye. Often, this causes customers to slow down cloud adoption. This allows them to understand their cloud bills and how they relate to their businesses. Some enterprises dedicate internal talent to analyze data or bring in outside help in a bid to understand cloud billing.
The only way to overcome these misunderstandings and myths is to plan meticulously. Cloud cost management requires carefully studying the existing workloads before moving them to the cloud.
