Why should your company consider cloud computing?

One of the things customer’s need to focus on as they consider moving to the cloud is a strong look at their application portfolio. There are two things that cost money in the IT world. The capacity required to run 100% of the solution (that is the cost of on-premise reality) and the reality of DR. I cannot tell you how many customers have started their cloud migrations assuming that they are truly doing the right things.

First and foremost the only fixed costs you have for cloud are storage and connectivity. No matter what you do, storage will cost you. That means if you put something in the cloud, be it code, data or applications you will pay for the storage. You will also pay for the bandwidth out, as in once connected the information your applications is pushing to the user. In this reality, you have an opportunity. Knowing you won’t change the storage story, you can change the computing story. Compute, being the active computer sessions or VM’s (Virtual Machines) that your organization is running.

Your organization can take a hard look at the reality of your solutions. How long during a standard workday do you need your system operational? If you are truly a 24 hour a day, seven days a week operation you can still save money with the cloud, just not on your initial solution costs. The first thing to do is to evaluate your solution compared to the reality of performance. Many organizations assume that cloud is cheaper and faster. It may never be either if you don’t evaluate what is required. If your solution is 24 by seven what percentage of the solution is required the entire day? Can you throttle down a bit and reduce the overall cost by running fewer servers during the slower hours of the day? Remember the cost of on-premise is always the reality of buying and maintaining 100% of the hardware required for the maximum usage periods. With cloud, you can begin to evaluate the true requirements for the applications. If you max user period is 11 am to 3 pm EDT, when you have 10,000 concurrent users and your lowest period is 11 pm to 3 am EDT where you have 1,000 connected users, you can save money. You only have to pay for 1/10th of your maximum cost for ¼ of the day.

The reality of true consumption is the first value statement of cloud computing!