Cloud usage and demand has spiked, but businesses must be wary of hidden cloud "gotchas" when it comes to modernizing and scaling their cloud infrastructure.
In response to the global workforce turning remote virtually overnight, organizations have been forced to push their connected environments, such as cloud networks and back-end infrastructure, to the limits. Simultaneously, governments and enterprises have been scrambling to leverage critical data-driven insights in the fight to contain COVID-19. Because of these recent events, the year 2020 has shed light on the utmost importance of having an agile, reliable modern cloud infrastructure in place, especially when digital transformation has, in many ways, been hastened by the pandemic.
However, putting the backbone of a cloud network together is no easy feat. Enterprises especially must be alert and aware of the “hidden costs” associated with the cloud. In partnership with Teradata, McKnight Consulting Group recently published a whitepaper comparing and contrasting companies’ modern cloud database options in terms of value to help organizations accurately determine and weigh the costs of their cloud decisions.
Say you’re looking to modernize your enterprise’s cloud infrastructure. To evaluate the true value of modern cloud database options, you should ask yourself the following questions:
Is that low price quote actually accurate? The cost profile options for basic cloud databases are straightforward if you accept the default, basic storage options. However, many decision-makers underestimate the total cost of ownership of cloud analytics platforms as they scale up their analytics programs. It can be enormously expensive and confusing if you seek the best price-performance for more robust, enterprise workloads and configurations. Don’t be fooled by the deceivingly low price points. Be skeptical about if this technology can truly support complex business intelligence needs.
What is the true cost of ownership? To accurately assess the cost of the cloud, companies need to evaluate all components of the cloud data warehouse including data size/nodes, separating storage and compute, impact of concurrency demand, total cost of ownership and more. There’s certainly an upside if demand is lower than predicted, but when demand exceeds expectation the cost ceiling can be quite high.
Once you’ve answered these questions, how do you take this information and determine the best cloud infrastructure option for your enterprise? Some cloud analytics platforms can appear beneficial and desirable, but often include “gotchas” to ramp up costs which many organizations do not realize until after deployment.
