Wired Magazine tells how some businesses are switching away from cloud computing due to increased costs or security concerns.
This makes sense, cloud computing is just a way of doing business and different methods work for different organisations.
One of the driving factors is cost, outsourcing your IT requirements to a public cloud company can make sense for a fast growing or cash strapped small business but for a larger organisation it can quickly become expensive.
Those costs though have to be examined carefully. The Wired article itself shows how major expenses can be overlooked in breaking down MemSQL’s expenses.
This past April, MemSQL spent more than $27,000 on Amazon virtual servers. That’s $324,000 a year. But for just $120,000, the company could buy all the physical servers it needed for the job — and those servers would last for a good three years. The company will add more machines over that time, as testing needs continue to grow, but its server costs won’t come anywhere close to the fees it was paying Amazon.
Missing from that calculation is the cost of employing sysadmins to maintain the servers. It’s quite easy to see how the staff expenses could easily eat up the 200,000 dollars a year in hosting costs.
Added to the staff costs are the security and continuity risks — backups, disaster recovery and fallover systems are not cheap and a handful of system administrators won’t have the resources to deal with all the complexities of modern information security.
There are many good reasons not to move a businesses’ IT systems onto the cloud, but it’s best to be careful when evaluating the costs and risks.
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