Cloud Costs: What Drives Up My Fees?

We are fortunate to live in a time in which a one person startup has access to the same tools as a large enterprise. Gone are the days of unaffordable software packages and long deployment cycles. The cloud has truly leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes.

But beyond marveling at the range of easily available choices in the cloud, there are some criteria that remain difficult for businesses to evaluate as they attempt to select the right software for their needs. Whether you are a large or small organization, you have defined processes, silos to integrate and proprietary and regulated data that may require specific governance.

There are many more business decisions to be made than an initial set up with a cloud solution of choice. These complexities lead to questions from our own customers - most commonly, ‘What drives up my cloud costs?'

What's the real deal with an SLA number?

How mission-critical an application is to your organization will determine the level of availability you'll want associated with a workload.  The sad truth is that many companies believe they can go hours, days, or weeks without key business systems.  That is, until they experience their first major outage of that system.  For example, the difference between a 99.9% and a 99.99% SLA is 39 minutes 26 seconds of downtime per month.  With a production halt and impact to your customers - this timeframe becomes overwhelming, and not to be repeated.

Site Resiliency

Many people mistakenly believe that because their solution is "in the cloud," everything is backed up from their locations, whether that be one location or sites all over the world. Unfortunately, many cloud providers don't ...