What's Price Got to Do With It? Why Enterprises Struggle to Calculate and Compare Costs to Run a Cloud Workload
NEW YORK, June 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- In this SPIE, Stratecast reviews the complexity surrounding cloud cost comparisons. We identify key considerations for businesses that are looking for the best cloud prices. We review specific use cases provided by different cloud service providers; use cases that emphasize the importance of looking at the workload requirements to identify the service that provides the best price-performance for a given workload. Finally, we offer recommendations for enterprises and cloud service providers.
Introduction
Despite the well-publicized cloud price wars, many enterprises have little understanding of what they pay for cloud services as compared with other infrastructure options, and (more importantly) what they could be paying. While three-quarters of cloud users believe that the cloud is helping them reduce costs, few can articulate how much they are saving or expect to save. Users who are looking to save often gravitate toward the mass market cloud providers that have dominated the "cloud pricing wars"—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft— rather than the high-touch, enterprise-grade service providers (such as IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, and Internap).3 The mass market providers' frequent and conspicuous rate decreases make it easy for would-be buyers to assume they are getting the best deal. Often that assumption is valid.
Yet, in recent months, enterprise-grade competitors have started taking aim against AWS and its ilk with price- and performance-based analyses showing specific use cases where their own services cost less and/or perform better than comparable competitive services. Stratecast has had an opportunity to review some of their calculations, and we find many of the analyses to be credible. Does that mean that IBM, Internap, CenturyLink and other enterprise-grade cloud service providers are the new "low-cost" providers? Not at all. Instead, the findings simply highlight the need for enterprises to do their homework in selecting the right service provider and the right service type for each workload—a recommendation that the mass-market providers tend to agree with.
But putting the onus on enterprises may be unfair. The lack of standardized cloud "units," the dizzying array of service components and options, and the absence of a baseline for understanding what cloud costs should be, all make it difficult for enterprises to make an informed assessment regarding price. In this SPIE, Stratecast reviews the complexity surrounding cloud cost comparisons. We identify key considerations for businesses that are looking for the best cloud prices. We review specific use cases
provided by different cloud service providers; use cases that emphasize the importance of looking at the workload requirements to identify the service that provides the best price-performance for a given workload. Finally, we offer recommendations for enterprises and cloud service providers.
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