Affordable cloud storage

To cloud or not to cloud?

During recent years there has been active discussion between active supporters of public cloud believers and opponents. Former believe that moving to cloud is an irreversible trend and that demise of on-premise (or colocation) datacenter is inevitable. Latter ones believe to hybrid cloud concept. I’m personally supporting the latter and will explain it in more detail. Learn what are common pitfalls in moving to the cloud and how Storadera’s cheap cloud storage can eliminate one major pitfall – cost.

During pandemic organisations moved to public cloud quickly due to eminent need to cope with new reality. Although there are many examples of use cases where it was not best decision due to high cost associated. Running workloads in cloud can be really expensive. Off course if you have not done your math correctly or have not done it all. Also migration to the cloud has been relatively easy, but to turn it back might not be so.

Analysts in IDC have predicted that up to 30% of current workloads will be migrated back over time. This is possibly not unambiguous migration, but rather a mix of different activities. For example moving data back to on-prem while application remains in the cloud. Also scenarios where companies are reducing costs by migrating some workloads back from cloud, but at the same time to increase risk tolerance, they are adopting multiple clouds for remaining workloads.

Cloud economics

One thing is for sure – widespread adoption of general cloud principles has already happened. For example automation, self-service etc in current on-premise IT environments. This is already a very cloud-like operational model.

Usually cost is driving the dialogue of cloud vs on-prem, but it should not be the only argument. More important is to make the right decision based on workload specifics. And also to take account wider organisation goals like risk awareness, industry regulations etc.

Universal concept to compare cloud vs on-prem costs is TCO. To be able to compare apples with apples, all costs need to be taken into account, other ways it is like lying to yourself. I mean ALL costs. From staffing and electricity costs in case of on-prem and data egress fees and microcharges in case of cloud.

It has been a general trend already for years that the density of hard drives has been growing fast over years. But not the price, meaning that unit price has been declining. Although current incumbent cloud providers have not passed this to customers. According to analysts AWS price for GB has been stable for the last 6+ years despite a decrease in raw storage costs. This is not the case in on-prem scenario. Buyers have received more bang for the buck over the years due to decrease in unit price.

Previously mentioned egress fees is probably one of the biggest hidden elements of public cloud economics. In a nutshell it means that service provider is charging customers to access it’s data and it can be really expensive. For example in case of frequent read-write operations. Therefore it is really important to understand all cost aspects before moving data and applications to the cloud – it is tied to a particular use case. Read also our article of article of most common cloud storage use cases where Storadera’s cheap cloud storage is really shining.

Is cheap cloud storage possible?

We at Storadera believe that simplicity and cost predictability is key to solve this problem, which is why lots of companies are afraid of cloud storage services. Our mission is to provide scalable service and at the same time provide very simple and predictable pricing. For our Storadera Space Premium service package you pay only 6€/TB/monthly. That’s all. It is that simple! No hidden costs!

With Storadera you can manage your risks better and have predictable and easy to calculate cloud storage costs.

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