6 hidden costs of cloud and how to avoid them

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

It should come as no surprise at this point that organizations of all sizes are flocking to the cloud with high hopes of reducing CapEx, making OpEx more predictable, enhancing scalability, making management easier and improving disaster preparedness. In fact, here in the opening weeks of 2013, a new study by Symantec finds that 94 percent of enterprises are at least discussing cloud or cloud services, up from 75 percent a year ago. But Symantec also reports that companies that rush into cloud deployments inevitably encounter a host of hidden costs.

ReRez conducted Symantec’s Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey from September to October 2012, gathering responses from 3,236 organizations in 29 countries–1,358 of the responses came from smaller and midsize businesses, while 1,878 came from larger enterprises. “This is a broad, robust survey,” says Dave Elliott, senior product marketing manager for Global Cloud Marketing at Symantec. “It was in planning for nine months and took two months to implement. What we found is that organizations have, in fact, actually embraced the cloud. Organizations have said, ‘Yes, the cloud is a real thing. We’re there.'”…

But ReRez and Symantec also found that the path to the cloud is often a rocky one. “There were a bunch of hidden costs or second-order issues that organizations are facing when they move to the cloud,” Elliott says. “In their rush to the cloud, they perhaps haven’t thought through all the implications of it. These second-order issues are significant, they’re real, but frankly they’re easy to overcome with just a little bit of planning.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com.au/article/446791/6_hidden_costs_cloud_how_avoid_them/?fp=16&fpid=1