Controlling Cloud Costs With Colocation – Managing Large Data Sets Without Breaking The Bank

A cloud-only IT infrastructure can offer your business many benefits with its ease of use, opportunities for expansion, and flexibility to adapt to your changing needs. But all of these benefits come at a cost. Without the proper cost optimization strategies in place, your cloud deployment expenses can quickly spin out of control.  Let’s take a quick look at some of the costs that are causing headaches and then hone in on how an architecture with a colocation backbone can provide a cost-efficient platform for hybrid architectures.

The Unexpected Costs

An initial pricing estimate for cloud services usually only considers the base needs: storage, memory, CPU, etc. What is often not included are all of the extras. Extra security, data analytics, email services, and so much more. If you don’t initially factor these into your budget, these add-ons will eat up a lot of cash.

Egress Fees

An egress fee occurs when you move data. This fee can be charged both when moving data within different cloud regions and transferring data out of the cloud. If you have servers scattered across several cloud provider’s regions, this can be a huge problem.  Loading data onto the cloud is always free, but you are charged per GB transferred when you move the data.  AWS, for instance, charges between $0.08 to $0.15 per GB transferred. By charging fees in this way, a cloud provider disincentives’ users from leaving their service; you are essentially locked in.

Additional Hidden Costs

In addition to add-ons and egress fees, here are some further hidden costs to watch out for:

• Overages
• Free Trials
• Support Packages
• Discounts with Strings Attached
• Unused Resources

How To Manage Your Costs

You get a bill from the cloud provider, and surprise, it is higher than you expected, and you have no idea why. Sound familiar?

According to a Gartner survey, “as high as 95% of business and IT leaders say that cloud billing is the most confusing part of public cloud adoption.”

Know What You Are Paying For

So, the first step in managing your cloud computing costs is to gain greater visibility on what you’re paying for. Review your monthly bills, dig through your dashboard resources, and don’t be afraid to call your provider and ask pointed questions. Once you know where you are hemorrhaging money, you can look at fixing it by minimizing egress fees, controlling capacity, discontinuing trial services, etc.

Don’t Over Provision

If you are worried about overage charges or expansion, you might consider provisioning additional resources that you don’t yet need, but be careful. You may think you are being proactive, but the extra spend each month will cost your company in the long run. According to Jay Chapel of Park My Cloud, the estimated spend on underutilized and oversized resources for 2019 exceeds $14 billion.

Cloud Connectivity Solutions

How Element Critical Can Help

How your business connects to your cloud provider can have a big impact on your data-related costs. Is your current cloud solution financially the best choice for your business’s growth and maintenance needs?

Element Critical’s Cloud Connect solution can save organizations up to 80% over the cost of using a carrier circuit. How do we do this? We securely deploy cloud connectivity with a dedicated connection to top cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud via a traditional carrier circuit and an on-demand network.

A Quick Cost Comparison

• AWS Comparison – for 500 MB bandwidth from a carrier circuit versus Element Critical’s Cloud Connect solution, businesses can save 56% on their monthly rate versus AWS Direct Connect Services over a 3-year term. *This comparison is based on a 1GB connection
• Microsoft Azure Comparison – for 1 GB of bandwidth from a carrier circuit versus Element Critical’s Cloud Connect solution, businesses can save 63.5% on their monthly rate versus Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute over a 3-year term. *This comparison is based on a 1GB connection

Beyond the extraordinary savings and instant provisioning we offer, our customers enjoy a self-service console to deploy and manage networks, the ability to dial-up/down bandwidth responsively, and a direct VPN network tailored to their organization’s short-term projects and long-term, more permanent networks. With all of these benefits, plus no minimum contracts and no penalty to cancel, we can help your business control your data costs without breaking the bank.

Learn More About How Colocation Can Make Cloud Connection Most Efficient For Your Business

Pure colocation architectures or pure cloud solutions may work for some companies; it is important to remember that these IT infrastructure approaches are not incompatible.  Many companies find that their initial jump to the cloud or the immense amount of data they need to host requires cost-efficiency strategies.  Hybrid cloud architectures optimize based upon workloads rather than an either-or colocation or cloud solution.  Hybrid cloud and colocation models or multi-cloud solutions can provide companies with the best features of each platform when implemented in a robust data center environment with dedicated connections to all the cloud providers you need.

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