Cloud costs and complexity can impact any growing business; learn what you can do about it
Enterprise IT leaders choose cloud infrastructure for many reasons, mostly related to speed and flexibility. While the benefits are undeniable, public cloud services also have their challenges. For some workloads, enterprises may decide that the benefits aren’t worth the hassle.
Businesses often reevaluate cloud infrastructure during periods of growth. As businesses expand, they need to expand their cloud services as well. This can lead to issues around cost, complexity and security. Moving workloads out of the cloud is one way to help address these issues.
Understanding cloud costs
While the cloud may have started as the most cost-effective place to run a particular workload, it doesn’t always stay that way. Numerous factors can impact your cloud bill, and these factors change as your business grows. There are other costs that won’t appear directly on your cloud bill but still need to be considered.
Cost of raw capacity
As your application gains users, you’ll need to add compute, network and storage resources. That’s why the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model can be problematic: The bigger the application, the more you pay. When your workload has a higher percentage of components that must run 24/7/365 than components that can scale based on demand, that workload may have outgrown the cloud.
Also, capacity isn’t always guaranteed. If you’re willing to pay significantly more for “dedicated” cloud resources, then there might be options available. However, your options for the specific size, type or quantity of system you need may be limited, or so expensive that it’s cost-prohibitive. Has the performance or availability of your workload ever been affected by reaching a previously unknown capacity limit?
Deploying a hybrid cloud environment can help you improve cost efficiency while maintaining cloud scalability and guaranteeing the right-sized fit for your workload’s performance requirements. You can keep the bulk of an application on more affordable on-premises infrastructure that’s custom-sized for your workloads, while also using cloud VMs for overflow capacity.
Cost of data egress
With AI workloads proliferating, data volume is rapidly increasing, but that data isn’t always where we need it to be. This means that companies often need to transfer large volumes of data quickly, and that can get expensive. Today’s businesses move cloud data in several ways, all of which carry costs:
- Moving data within the cloud, potentially between regions to reach AI-ready hardware
- Moving data between clouds to access preferred systems and tools from specific providers
- Egressing data from the cloud for inference or agent processing
Regardless of whether egress costs are soaring due to AI adoption or simply natural workload expansion, many companies are feeling this pain and looking for answers.
Cost of labor and tools
When businesses compare the cost of running workloads in the cloud to running them on-premises, they often overlook the cost of labor. Although they don’t directly pay for racking, stacking and maintaining hardware in cloud data centers, administering a cloud environment at scale is still labor-intensive.
Operations teams are vital to managing and maintaining cloud workloads. They need to understand not only the underlying cloud infrastructure but also the architecture of the applications deployed. Cloud computing can be challenging operationally, especially without the right tools in place. Cloud management solutions can be helpful but can also increase costs quickly. To control licensing and operating costs, you should aim to use as few of these tools as possible.
Every change in tooling carries costs beyond that of the tools themselves. When a new tool is introduced, it must be extensively tested, and staff must be trained on how to use it to meet their objectives. Changing tools means changing operating processes, which also carries significant costs. Tooling changes can also introduce vulnerabilities into your environment, both in terms of performance and the overall security of your platform.
When a cloud workload starts to feel difficult and expensive to manage using your existing team and toolset, it’s time to reconsider whether it should be a cloud workload.
Cost of outages and performance issues
Both outages and performance degradation can be disruptive and costly, in the form of lost business, lost reputation, lost productivity and the cost of mitigation and recovery. Clouds have excellent methods to monitor, track and respond to these issues; however, they often come with their own potentially unforeseen costs. This could include additional data storage for logging, data analytics and response tools needed to identify and correct problems as they arise. These costs may not appear in the early days of the cloud, but they’ll creep up over time, and they aren’t easily spotted on your cloud bills.
If you’re experiencing outages and performance issues, consider the duration and frequency. If you’re dealing with regular and prolonged incidents, then your workload has likely outgrown the cloud. If they’re short and sporadic, you may be able to address them within your existing cloud environment, but it won’t always be worth it to do so. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How long does it take to resolve incidents?
- What tools and skillsets are needed to fix the problems?
- Was the resolution automatic, or did it require human effort?
- Was the resolution to increase capacity, and therefore increase spend?
Depending on your answers, you may decide it’s time to cut your losses and move the workload away from cloud.
Managing architectural complexity
As some cloud workloads grow, they may bump up against the architectural limitations of the cloud platform. Maybe a particular database service isn’t available in a market you need to expand into. Maybe the cloud provider set up their network in a way that isn’t optimal for your specific workload as it scales.
Latency is a primary concern for many workloads in the cloud. Designing around this often leads to added complexity and costs. As your business grows and thrives, so do the systems and services that support that success. Without careful consideration and thoughtful design patterns, the distribution of these services and workloads can become unwieldy. They can also become incredibly costly, especially due to redundancy and resiliency requirements.
Whatever the issue, it usually requires a workaround, which increases management complexity. At this point, it’s worth considering whether hybrid infrastructure or a different infrastructure environment altogether may be a better fit for the workload at hand.
Considering cloud security
By using a cloud provider, you’re entrusting your sensitive data to a massive organization facing their own share of threats and vulnerabilities. This could include insecure APIs, account hijacking, data breaches and more.
Cloud providers update their Terms of Service frequently. Many key details can be overlooked when simply agreeing to them. One especially important area to understand here is precisely what data of yours the cloud has access to, and what they can do with it.
Also, cloud providers use a shared responsibility model for security, so it’s important to know exactly where their security responsibilities end and yours begin. You need a solid understanding of the risks you face and the cost of managing them to determine whether a workload would be better off in a single-tenant environment that you control completely instead of a shared one.
Enabling an optimized hybrid multicloud platform
When determining whether a workload has outgrown the cloud, you also need to consider your alternatives. It’s hard to match cloud scalability and agility using on-premises data centers. Colocation is another option. It removes the cost and complexity of building and operating your own data centers. A dedicated colocation environment that’s optimally configured for your workloads and placed strategically near high concentrations of end users can optimize performance, security and cost.
You can also use colocation to implement a hybrid cloud architecture that includes a private storage environment. This allows you to spread workloads across colocation and cloud, placing each workload in its ideal environment. When you decide to use the cloud, you can do so while maintaining custody over your data, instead of placing it in cloud native storage. This allows you to avoid data egress fees and ensure data mobility.
Equinix offers a global colocation platform with data centers in 76 metros worldwide. This makes it easy to choose the right location for any workload you move out of the cloud. In addition, Equinix data centers offer interconnection capabilities for effective hybrid multicloud networking.
With Equinix Fabric®, our Network as a Service solution, you can quickly and easily link your infrastructure in different parts of the world. This allows you to create the interconnected storage environment you need to maintain control over your data. You can also set up on-demand virtual connections with various cloud providers, making it easy to move workloads wherever they need to go. Thus, whenever you decide to move a workload off the cloud or migrate from one cloud to another, you can execute that change quickly.
To learn more about why effective hybrid multicloud networking is so essential in today’s rapidly changing business world, read the white paper Thriving with a hybrid multicloud strategy.
EQUINIX Blog. Ch. L.