The challenge of cloud comparison
Migrating existing services to the cloud promises great service levels, improvements in performance and IT agility. There are several challenges that organisations face before reaching the sunny uplands, including :
- How do you select the right cloud provider for your needs?
- Will they offer the right level of service?
- Where will your data be hosted?
- Will you be big enough to get the right attention?
- How do you generate a realistic data-driven business case that will convince colleagues to move to the cloud?
- How do you understand the true cost of services once you've migrated and generate a data-driven business case?
- How do you really compare the detailed costs of different providers against each other?
- Is it possible to get the best out of multiple cloud providers simultaneously to spread any risk?
- How do you analyse and understand what you already in your existing data centres or service providers? Frequently, we see client services
If you get it wrong, the pain of moving once again and personal cost to reputation can be huge.
Understanding your existing server estate.
If you have a large, complex server estate which has grown over time, how do you really understand what you have installed and what is running?
What can be decommissioned and which unloved servers are really business critical?
Scale of comparing costs using cloud calculators.
Once you have a good understanding of this estate, the major challenge then starts of working out how what each provider will cost to migrate and then ongoing post the move.
Some cloud providers (such as AWS or Azure) include on-line calculators that can help to provide high level costs for their service only. However, the reality of these services are that they require a significant effort to take each existing service and manually match that service to the cloud provider of choice.
Each cloud provider offers different services and charges for each location. This means that this process needs to be repeated for every single location of choice.
What makes this worse still is to get an accurate comparison across providers, this process must be run many times for many different providers.
Question for us : how frequently are cloud provider prices changing?
Keeping cloud provider prices current
Cloud prices frequently change and as a result, there's a good chance that by the time initial analysis work has been completed, the data and matches will be out of date and needs to be reworked.
Given the scale of this challenge many professional service providers using "mapping spreadsheets". These are often manually created and don't contain the latest pricing or regional differences.
What's worse, is that this still required large amounts of manual effort and time which is at best error prone, slow and expensive.
Taking even a modest server estate of 300 virtual machines and a look-up time of 5 mins per virtual machine and once quality assurance check, to compare the leading providers in their main locations would take cc hours of continual analysis time.
Understanding what else you need to purchase.
Mapping like for like
If this wasn't enough, the true complexity comes in trying to determine how cloud providers really relate. For good reasons, cloud providers make it very difficult to really compare their services and pricing.
The way storage, CPU and throughput are calculated vary provider to provider. Data centers exists in different locations with different services and capabilities. Each provider then requires different additional services to be layers in with different licensing arrangement. all of this and this adds significant complexity.
Most service providers align with a single cloud partner in order to get around this complexity but this means if you're interested in numerous migration prices before making the decision to migrate, or your looking for a multi-cloud migration solution, you get a very substandard service and never understand your true options for multi-cloud or multi hybrid cloud.
In the world of rich analytics solutions, surely there has to be a simpler and faster approach?
The better way of comparing cloud prices.
The good news is there is a better way.
The problem of multi-cloud pricing complexity and been solved through our rich Cloud Compare on-line analytics service.
Cloud Compare enables users to analyse multiple cloud providers pricing side by side in seconds. It takes existing on-premise servers and runs a powerful proprietary matching algorithm to identify the best fit server from each provider in near real-time, using the very latest pricing.
Clients can specify if any existing machines are to remain on-premise. It allows different colours providers to be selected on a pet environment basis. This allows for complex hybrid and multi cloud scenarios to be analysed and generated.
Cloud provider prices are updated very frequently any any price changes are automatically highlighted. This means ask the pain of keeping provider pricing updated is removed.
Finally, there is an easy to use, powerful cloud comparison service takes the time, effort and complexity of finding the right cloud provider and generating a business case to get the best of the cloud.
Understanding how cloud provider prices compare is easy.
Next article: if your service provider users a spreadsheet to perform cloud matched , fire them!