The cloud has become ubiquitous in today’s enterprise IT landscape, but as it has become more of a fixture, more information is coming to light about its cost efficacy. Let’s dive into how the cloud may not be as cost-conscious as one may think.
The Costs and Lock-In of the Cloud
When the cloud first came into prominence, many touted the technology for its cost savings. In theory, these savings came from the concept of operational expenses: comparatively to traditional implementations that require on-premises server setups, the cloud doesn’t need any hardware. In that way, the cloud only costs the monthly or annual subscription; no big upfront costs are required.
A tune on the lips of many anti-cloud IT practitioners was the inevitability of lock-in. With the cloud, especially cloud-based storage, once you’ve utilized cloud storage, it’s incredibly difficult to get out. Your critical information now lives on someone else’s server, meaning you have to pop up your own on-prem data center in order to gain sole custody of your information. Cloud infrastructure solutions are also notorious at not being good at playing nicely with one another, so if you want to switch your cloud provider, get ready for a bit of a headache.
Public Cloud Hotel California Costing Exposed
New data has come to light supporting the idea that the cloud isn’t as cost effective as previously thought, and further reinforces the concept that cloud service providers lock you into their services. Chris Mellor of Blocks and Files needled into the report from William Blain financial analyst, Jason Ader, in a recent post. In summary, Mellor writes:
Storing a petabyte of data in an Amazon file system can cost 400 per cent more per month than storing it in an on-premises all-flash file store, and moving it back on premises can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Cloud suppliers want to stop customers moving their data out.
Dig into the data and Mellor’s takeaways by reading the rest of Public cloud Hotel California costing exposed
