IT managers must consider potentially crippling cloud outages when calculating the real cost of a cloud service.
As any networking professional knows, downtime costs money. However, few know exactly what quantity of money downtime costs. Estimates, calculations, and incidentals are all open to interpretation. This creates a great deal of uncertainty.
Cloud computing is a superb tool to exploit here. Many IT pros are turning to cloud-based technologies to mitigate the price of downtime. However, is the viability of a cloud migration backed by facts or according to suppositions?
The assumption that cloud services can reduce downtime is founded at the belief that third-party providers deploy all types of continuity technology that every one but guarantees uptime. That belief, coupled with service-level agreements (SLAs) that make promises about limiting unscheduled interruptions in service, can provide you a feeling of security. The $64000 question becomes whether that sense of security is fake or justified — and, more importantly, whether a price may be assigned to it.
To determine that, one has to delve into some complex calculations to expose the actual operational costs of the cloud — how much it costs when it really works and what sort of it costs when it doesn’t. Those costs ought to when compared with an equal scenario for non-cloud services. Obviously, operational costs and intangibles also should be taken under consideration.
For example, IT operations should keep in mind the prices of a facility, the employees, and everything surrounding it after which correlate the price the ability offers to the enterprise. That’s a really complex calculation. Then again, a cloud service should be would becould very well be calculated all the way down to the costs charged and any related incidentals: internal support staff, connectivity, etc. Though it kind of feels simpler to calculate the price of the cloud, the numbers could be easily skewed by overlooked elements, contractual price changes, changes in scale, and many others.
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Frank J. Ohlhorst is an award winning technology journalist, professional speaker, and IT business consultant with greater than 25 years of expertise within the technology arena. View Full Bio
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