Comparing on-premises computing costs with cloud costs can be a challenge, with many organisations finding that migrating to the cloud costs more than expected. To optimise costs and still get the benefits of the cloud requires careful balancing of budget and business value, says Greg Schroder, manager of Solution Architecture at Entelect.
Schroder says organisations need adequate load forecasting to understand cloud usage and growth now and in the future. “It might be cost-effective now, but in the case of rapid scaling, costs could get out of hand. Organisations also need to understand factors like how the developers need to use the cloud – does each one need their own instances or are there suitable emulators locally?” he says.Schroder notes that moving to the cloud is not necessarily a cost saver.
Schroder says: “It is important to have clearly defined goals around why the organisation is moving to cloud, and experienced people assisting with this planning. Cloud platforms do offer pricing calculators, but there are so many ways to utilise cloud, so many varieties of workloads and the intricacies of the architecture to consider. It can be hard to compare apples with apples when looking at on-premises versus cloud, because the opex and capex are very different.