Cloud, or more aptly, cloud computing has come a long way since 2006 when Google’s Eric Schmidt popularised it for the first time while describing his company’s approach to software-as-a-service or SaaS.
Today there is a whole new, or refurbished, industry worth $100 billion that has been built around cloud computing, touted as the next era of IT. On one side the hype around cloud is fading even as more and more enterprises are adopting it, on the other, there are some who have realised that not everything is as rosy as was idolised.
While early adopters such as Netflix and several others tasted success by making the first move to cloud, several others, especially from the enterprise community, ended up being disappointed because they achieved neither cost effectiveness nor less capital expenditure (capex), despite going for an operational expenditure (opex) model. There are several factors which led to such situations. Enterprises tend to oversee a lot of factors or end up making late realisations in terms of what to invest where. Let us see some of such unexpected cost, or hidden costs, which call for additional investment.
1. Opex need not be always the best
2. Pay-as-you-go is not a magic
3. Cloud is not just a technology, but also a service
4. What to invest where
5. Security comes at a cost
6. Public cloud is not always cheap: Keep a limit
7. Not everybody is a cloud provider
So as we saw there are a lots of ways in which CIOs can be taken unawares when it comes to cloud and its associated cost. However, that does not mean that cloud is not good, just keep in the mind that there is lot more to it, than just what vendors try to project, and what meets the eyes or ears.
By: Deepa Damodaran
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Stephan Cico, SR Director, TigerCloud
