Technology column reboot, moving to cloud…

I have a friend that reads my blog. She has acted as my “monitor” for the past five or so years. By monitor, she reminds me when I have grabbed a topic, and shaken it to the point of it no longer being something I need to be shaking. She mentioned that in her email to me yesterday. Um, she said, as she usually does start a critique, you’ve beaten the who owns my image, and we are being watched thing to death let’s let it rest for a bit ok? The easy answer is, of course, I am ranting against a perceived injustice and shouldn’t stop. Did Dr. King stop? Did Gandhi Stop? No, they continued the fight until it was won. But my issue isn’t quite the size of the issues Gandhi and Dr. King were facing. My monitor is right, I have spent a lot of time on the topic so for a few days time to move on. I won’t drop right into another drone post, I have done a lot of those recently as well. My longtime monitor also mentioned that I had published a lot of digital camera pieces lately. She asked if I could perhaps explore another avenue of technology for a few days. What should I talk about? That, of course, left me struggling for a technology column. I decided to slip in a short piece I have been thinking about, in the area of cloud consumption. Most customer’s when considering cloud don’t think about consumption.

For example, if I have a data center, and I am running my solutions, I run that 24 hours a day. When I have the same set of solutions in the cloud, I do not have to run them 24 hours a day. When the solution isn’t needed, I can shut down my cloud assets. There are a number of tools in the space that automate the hours of operation. But why pay for more than you use? If you only need the solution from 1o is to 1 pm, then by all means turn it off the other 21 hours a day. What that also does however, is change the cost comparison for on-prmise versus cloud solutions. If I don’t need the solution on all the time, I can reduce the cost of the solution in the cloud by a percentage. Consumption models are hard to build, but built correctly can easily generate the 20% savings that cloud service providers are always telling you about.