Is Colocation the Solution to Cloud Costs Heading Up, Up, and Away?
If your monthly Amazon Web Services (AWS) budget has ballooned into five or six figures, you’re far from alone. From the startup to the enterprise, ripping through your cloud budget is uncomfortably common.
Increasing and unpredictable public cloud costs have driven companies to move at least some of their applications and data OUT of the cloud. A Barclays survey of CIOs reported that 83% of enterprises planned to move some of their workloads in the public cloud back to their own privately managed infrastructure. Fewer than one in five companies had no plans to repatriate cloud workloads.
A Money-Saving Move to Colocation: Earlier this year Yellowbrick Data, whose Cloud Data Warehouse and Cloud DR products are major native cloud applications, detailed new initiatives for moving workloads from the public cloud into colocation infrastructure they controlled. They found they were able to achieve an overall savings of approximately 50%, or $3.9 million per year. They now spend $50,000 per month leasing colocation space, and conservatively estimates the equivalent capacity in AWS would be $375,000 per month.
Some applications with workloads that have to be able to be scaled up and down rapidly and unpredictably are best suited for the cloud. But your predictable, routine workloads are probably addressed most economically using hardware you control. You should be especially careful in evaluating whether new cloud deployments of existing workloads will give you business advantages that outweigh the greater costs and complexity. If your applications are working well in traditional data center infrastructure an on-prem or colocation data center will generally give you the most efficient and reliable solution.
For more information on cloud adoption read our white paper Cloud Challenges.
We speak to people about their cloud cost overruns, how to mitigate them and how to avoid them in the future nearly every week. If you’d like to have that discussion strategy@directLTx.com is a great way to get in touch with us.