To most, cloud-first means speed, agility, and innovation. What if it could mean paying 10 to 12 times more than running workloads in your own data center?
Naturally that would be a non-starter for any organization with the goal of not only gaining cloud flexibility but lowering IT costs. Which is why most organizations choose to commit to annual or multi-year cloud contract commitments. For a large upfront payment, the hyperscale public cloud providers will typically provide deep discounts off their cloud infrastructure retail pricing.
While this can take the sting out of the costs of using public cloud resources, it doesn’t take the risk out of paying far more than what you thought you bargained for. In reality, most organizations who have pre-committed cloud spend end up consuming less than they anticipated, resulting in the forfeiture of their unused balance to the cloud provider.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much better for those organizations that conservatively estimate their cloud resource consumption needs. They often undersize their cloud infrastructure requirements by up to 20% (with some underestimating as much as two times the actual usage) resulting in overage fees that are calculated at full fare cloud pricing (10 to 12 times the on-premises cost).
It would seem that in return for the business speed that public cloud solutions deliver, organizations could put themselves at a significant financial disadvantage.
What if organizations could get all the benefits of public cloud without the risk of wildly unpredictable cloud spending? In addition, what if IT decision makers could leverage a large roster of cloud experts that could help efficiently accelerate business outcomes?
In what could be a happy medium for many organizations, multi-cloud managed service providers can provide organizations with the best of private and public cloud flexibility, agility and efficiency – without a financial sword dangling overhead.
These multi-cloud managed service providers have data center co-location facilities that are adjacent to the cloud. Meaning they have high speed connections to all three hyperscale public cloud providers, allowing for speedy access to the cloud.
These providers can help IT decision makers design a strategy that identifies how to best distribute workloads across public and private cloud infrastructure, while enhancing efficiencies. For example, they can provide guidance on how to leverage lower cost cloud infrastructure options for non-production workloads, like application development, using AWS spot instances, Azure spot VMs and preemptible VM instances from Google.
In addition, some providers can help eliminate cloud egress fees, which can ultimately deliver substantial savings, especially if there is a need to frequently move data into and out of the cloud.
And while public cloud outages are rare events, a wide scale outage could have a major impact on service availability. Cloud service providers can help devise a strategy to reduce risk by advising on how to best distribute workloads across multiple public cloud providers.
There are other advantages to this approach:
- Increased workload mobility – data and application services residing in private cloud environments can be easily migrated to the public cloud and vice versa – giving organizations more control over how they manage their applications and data and avoiding cloud lock-in.
- More predictable costs – Financial decision makers want to leverage the cloud to drive down expenses but they are typically more sensitive to widely fluctuating costs. A cloud services provider can help make costs more predictable and as importantly, identify where the public cloud can be leveraged in tandem with private cloud infrastructure to deliver optimal price/performance.
- Access to scarce IT talent – The shortage of IT skill sets across cloud, cyber-resiliency, cloud data protection, storage and emerging technologies has been well documented by the Dell Technologies GDPI research. Partnering with a managed services provider is a smart move since it enables organizations to spend less time on IT infrastructure and more time on innovation.
You don’t have to go it alone in your cloud-first strategy. Dell Technologies and Faction are ready to help you get the best of private and multi-cloud agility with multi-cloud data services that deliver hosting, cloud connectivity and storage and data protection platforms as fully managed services.
Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerProtect and PowerScale along with Faction’s networking intellectual property allows you to use your data on premises and/or in a private cloud, and simultaneously access it from multiple public clouds. This helps to simplify IT while attaining the efficiency, performance, data protection and cyber-resiliency needed to confidently drive your business forward, without the risk of cloud-induced price sticker shock.