Article summary
In this short article, we provide an overview of what cloud comparison services offer and how they can help organisations that are planning a future migration of existing IT services to the public cloud or are in the process in the process of migrating.
Cloud comparison services overview
Cloud comparison services are for organisations that are looking to move their existing on-premise virtual machines/private cloud servers to public cloud using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It enables users to match their exact current specifications for each machine to the specific services required in each public cloud provider and to compare different services side by side. Having analysed different providers, different varieties of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud selections can be made, enabling the user to get the best of each cloud provider.
What problem do they address?
The traditional way of providing this kind of analysis requires cloud aware technical staff to capture the existing on-premise estate in detail and then look up on equivalent or nearest possible services each cloud providers services inventory or cloud calculators. For each machine, the specifications, operating system, storage, licensing and other requirements must be matched as closely as possible. Frequently a perfect match doesn’t exist and the analyst has to make an informed guess about the match. If different providers are to be assessed or different locations analyses, this process has to be repeated several times.
For large estates, this process takes a very significant amount of effort and complexity. Worse still, as prices change, the models become outdated and inaccurate. This could mean that by the time a large set of matches have been made, the pricing models could be outdated and unavailable. This will only be known after any business case or migration work has started and will require on-the-fly budget changes or technical re-planning.
How do cloud comparison services work?
Cloud comparison services harmonise the costs, capabilities and terminology across services between providers, which would otherwise be highly complex to map manually.
Using rich-matching algorithms, the service scans and identifies the best-match services requires for each machine currently used and their associated cost across a wide variety of different cloud providers and locations (which all offer different services and prices, even for the same cloud vendor) at speed and scale.
This allows customers who are unsure which cloud provider is right for them to get a detailed understanding of the bill of materials and pricing by location.
This is critical for cloud migration and managed service providers who are actively engaged in migration projects and who are looking to quickly get a full understanding of the IaaS services they need to procure for their client. This helps clients either generate initial cost models and business cases or full migration details once the right provider has been selected.
Keeping prices live
Cloud Comparison also ensures that any cost analyses and inventories produced are live and up to the minute. As any cloud provider prices change, the software is able to automatically update the prices
This makes a dramatic improvement in speed to plan, ability to generate cost models spring business cases and improve the accuracy.
Perhaps the biggest driving factor in using data-driven multi-cloud and hybrid cloud analysis services is that over time as cloud providers become more prevalent and complex, the cloud comparison software takes more and more migration scenarios in to account.