Cloud Cruiser Simplifies Tracking of Hybrid Cloud Costs

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Most IT organizations spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out the actual cost differential between delivering IT services via a public cloud versus on premise. There’s no doubt that virtual machines running in a public cloud are going to be less expensive, but when all the costs of delivering an IT service are fully loaded, the public cloud is not always the cheaper choice.

To help IT organizations sort through that financial morass, Cloud Cruiser this week announced it has added CloudSmart-Now templates to its cloud financial management service. The templates make it simpler for IT organizations to figure out their true costs across hybrid cloud computing environments.

Deirdre Mahon, chief marketing officer for Cloud Cruiser, says the templates were built around a service that collects cost data from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Windows Azure Pack (WAP), VMware and Openstack. The entire IT financial analytic service can be set up in as little as five days and continually monitors pricing changes being made by the “Big Five” cloud service providers. Using that data, IT organizations can then make a more intelligent choice about where to host any given application workload.

While many IT organizations have adopted a “cloud first” strategy when it comes to deploying new application workloads, that doesn’t always mean they will deploy those applications on a public cloud. In many instances, the cost differential may not even be enough to overcome security concerns. In addition, there are many forms of cloud computing that might drive those organizations to choose a smaller cloud service provider that may be more expensive than one of the Big Five, but provides a better customer experience or higher levels of application performance.

Obviously, when it comes to the cloud, cost is always going to be a factor. But when all things are considered, cost is only one of several issues that IT organizations have to contend with in the era of the cloud. The challenge is being able to produce data that backs up the reason a particular platform was chosen.