5 Hidden Costs of Cloud Backup
Enterprises have suffered from a lack of visibility into how their cloud services are being utilized and their impact on monthly costs. This week, Spiceworks unfurled a Cloud Cost Monitor tool that provides that visibility for free.
Spiceworks has a long history of providing IT management tools for free as part of an online IT community it manages. Peter Tsai, an IT analyst for Spiceworks, says the decision to expand that strategy into cloud cost tools is driven by the significant amount of ongoing debate there is about whether cloud services are actually less expensive than on-premise IT infrastructure.
Much of that debate centers around the monthly fees incurred over, for example, a three-year period versus the cost of acquiring local IT infrastructure. A recent survey of the Spiceworks online community found that only 25 percent believe that cloud services are actually less expensive.
Cloud Cost Monitor provides IT organizations with a tool for monitoring consumption of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud services. Tsai says the best thing about Cloud Cost Monitor is that it enables IT organizations to track their cloud spending over an extended period of time.
“We wanted to give IT professionals a tool for creating a baseline on their cloud spending that is also easy to set up,” says Tsai.
Regardless of the cloud cost debate, it still takes much less time to provision public cloud resources than it does to deploy IT infrastructure on premise. IT organizations are being pressed to be more agile, so the ability to quickly spin up virtual machines on a public cloud service is proving to be a critical requirement. But just because a workload began life in a public cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it makes economic sense for it to live there forever.
