🕒 Reading Time: 2 minutesI talk to a lot of companies that want to move workloads into the cloud. When asked why, the immediate response is always “to save money”. The primary goal is to save money on electricity, hardware and staff. This is all good in theory, however, the cloud can actually cost more than an on-premise solution if you pick the wrong company or the wrong service. This article will explain the benefits of public and private cloud infrastructure from our point of view and how not to get locked into a cloud solution that eats away at your company’s profits. When a public cloud costs more than private cloud:

• Deployments with high processing requirements
• Deployments with high bandwidth requirements
• Deployments with tight compliance guidelines
• Deployments with large storage requirements

Services like AWS have complicated pricing models that make it easy for users to miscalculate their costs. Customers sign up for services under the premise that there are no setup fees and all services are paid on an on-demand basis. The reality is once all IT services are placed in these cloud environments the price goes up dramatically. This is due to customers often overlooking the cost of bandwidth and storage in these environments until it is too late. The media focuses on giant corporate cloud providers like Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, and IBM. However, what the media fails to mention is there are other cloud solutions available and not just the public cloud. Below, I would like to provide a brief description of the different kinds of cloud services:

• Public Clouds leverage the internet for access to hardware and virtualized resources shared in multi-tenant environment.
• Virtual Private Clouds consist of private clouds isolated within a public cloud for a single tenant. Kind of like having your own floor in an apartment building.
• Dedicated Private Clouds provide dedicated hardware so customers may retain control over management and security.

 

How to get the best price for cloud services

Often times paying for cloud services is nothing like paying for dedicated servers. Pricing models often have a multitude of variables,making them more difficult to understand. Most customers do not know how to assess current computing, storage, and networking needs, much less project them for the future. To add to the confusion most companies charge per virtual machine plus an additional fee for the storage and the bandwidth associated with that virtual machine. When considering a cloud solution create a spreadsheet with all of the charges. This simple task will help bring certainty to the true cost of moving workloads into the cloud.

CARI.net addresses cloud infrastructure

CARI.net provides a consultative approach for customers considering moving IT resources into the cloud. We offer a diverse range of enterprise-grade solutions to provide a custom fit for each of our customer’s requirements. Not every customer requires a fully-custom private cloud. A lot of customers I speak with are just fine with a simple $10.00 cloud server. Once their workloads increase, we can scale to meet their needs effortlessly. Our goal is to simply deliver a solution combining the right level of performance, business fit, and price structure.