FINAL WORD
The pricing tiers add a layer of complexity which means there is not a single recurring cost to add to the balance sheet.
For most businesses, change is driven by the need to reduce risk and innovate, while optimising cost and return on investment. In the case of cloud adoption, the powerful functionality offered by these platforms enable businesses to streamline, optimise, and make their workflows more efficient which, in turn, helps reduce costs. Organisations are always looking for the best solutions for optimising efficiency and reducing costs, particularly in uncertain economic times.
Yet, in reality, migrating to the cloud does not always bring the cost optimisation and savings that an organisation is looking to benefit from. Depending on which cloud solution is being evaluated, along with how the solution is designed, built, and deployed, the result may not deliver on the project’ s original goals.
The pricing models of certain cloud platforms can be difficult to understand, due to their granular and complex pricing structures. Without a complete and informed understanding, along with a rigorous planning process, the result can be unexpected and unpredictable costs.
To ensure that the right choices are made to achieve strategic objectives, it is critical for businesses to utilise skilled expertise, both business and technical, to navigate the variety of decisions that need to be made.
When exploring cloud pricing structures, the initial costs may seem quite attractive but after delving deeper to examine the details, certain aspects may become cloudy. The pricing tiers add a layer of complexity which means there is not a single recurring cost to add to the balance sheet.
Rather, cloud fees vary depending on the provider, features, and several usage factors such as on-demand use, data transfer volumes, technical support, bandwidth, disk performance, and other core metrics, which can influence the overall solution’ s price.
However, the good news is there are ways to gain control of and manage these costs. One option is to lean on a Managed Service Provider, MSP that understands the pricing structures used by cloud providers and can plan and identify potential overlapping services, eliminate inefficiencies from the organisation’ s core applications and data, and make decisions that optimise spend.
With this understanding, the result is a right-sized and optimised application and network architecture that can result in streamlined and predictable cloud costs.
Adopting a multi-cloud approach offers many benefits for organisations, such as enhanced reliability as workloads are distributed across multiple clouds. Vendor diversity can minimise potential downtime and reduce the risks associated with outages that may occur with a single provider.
A multi-cloud strategy also allows organisations to choose the platform that will deliver their applications in the most efficient way possible, both in terms of performance and cost. However, it is important to consider the implications regarding management overhead, the required skill set, and the need to ensure optimised cost across multiple platforms with differing models.
To benefit from a multi-cloud approach, companies should weigh up the risks of opting for one vendor against the complexities of working with several providers. This might add additional requirements to design, procure, and manage connectivity between different platform architectures, not only adding complexity to the solution but also potentially adding further costs to the balance sheet.
However, there are ways to manage these costs and often calling on the expertise of an MSP to assist with the design, implementation, and real time
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