Cost Overruns and Misgovernance: Two Threats to Your Cloud Data Journey

So you’re moving data into the cloud. That’s great! After all, cloud compute and storage can supercharge your organizations’ digital strategy. But you should also be aware of new challenges that you will face, including unexpected cloud fees and the difficulty of governing data as it traverses on prem, cloud, and edge locations.

These are some of the conclusions of a recent IDC survey commissioned by Seagate titled “Future-Proofing Storage,” which surveyed 1,050 American tech executives at companies with over 1,000 employees.

Among the more eye-catching statistics to come out of the survey was this: 99% of respondents said they incur planned or unplanned egress fees at least on an annual basis. Companies are moving lots of data to lots of different places, and it’s accelerating.

“This is the new model,” says Rags Srinivasan, the senior director of growth verticals at Seagate. “In this data age, what you see is data is not just going to stay in one place. It moves from edge to cloud, even from cloud to a private cloud or to another cloud where it needs to be. The data is in motion.”

On average, the egress fees accounted for 6% of the monthly bill from cloud providers, according to the survey. While the report didn’t specify what percentage of the fees were unexpected, egress fees in general are “a huge concern,” Srinivasan says.

“When you look at the number one concern for most of them, they don’t know yet what the egress charge is going to be,” he tells Datanami. “They may not have come to a point [or] unlocked the use cases that requires them to get the data. So it’s going to come as an unplanned or surprising charge.”

None of the major public cloud providers charge anything for moving data into their clouds, but they all charge to move data out. Microsoft Azure charges the least: $0.087 per GB for up to 10 TB per month. Amazon Web Services charges $0.09 for the same amount, and Google Cloud charges $0.12.

Cloud storage and data egress fees make up just part of the monthly bill that organizations receive from their cloud providers. The companies charge differently for the various compute instances they provide. And if you use a premium service, such as Google Cloud Big Query or Azure Synapse Analytics, there will be additional fees on top of that.

Organizations need to better understand not only how they’re storing the data, but how they’re accessing their data. Cloud providers will charge differently depending on where the data is stored and what APIs are used to access it. It is not always directly obvious, so organizations should plan some time to plot it out to avoid any surprises, Srinivasan says.

“When you go look at the cloud, there are multiple tiers,” he says. “Which one do I pick?  Do I pick one based on the price? But then it comes with restrictions, like if you want to access the data, you need to wait for four hours. Or if you want to analyze the data, it needs to be moved to a different tier, which costs a different price.”

Your CIO may desire to have all of your applications running in containerized microservices in the cloud, and pull the data out through REST APIs. That is a worthy goal, if not a perfect fit for every application type.