Cloud Costs And Other Conundrums

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Howard Baldwin.

There has been a whole lotta brouhaha recently about public clouds – that is, the cloud services provided by such tech heavyweights as Amazon, Google GOOG +2.55%, IBM IBM +0.54%, Hewlett-Packard HPQ +0.79%, Microsoft MSFT +0.55%, Oracle ORCL +1.16%, and Rackspace.

They theoretically represent a less-expensive way for enterprises to provide computing infrastructure without actually spending on hardware and management. They are not to be confused with SaaS applications, which theoretically represent a less-expensive way for enterprises to provide computing infrastructure without actually spending on software and management…

I say theoretically, because cloud computing has not always been shown to be cheaper (it does, however, provide more flexibility). Arthur Cole addresses this conundrum in his IT Business Edge post this week insisting that no, the cloud is not always cheaper. “Spending on IT is dropping while spending on cloud services is increasing,” he acknowledges, but correlation does not equal causality. “[R]ecent analyses show that once internal infrastructure begins deploying cloud services of its own, it can meet enterprise needs for about $100 per user while Amazon and other providers come in at around $200 per user,” Cole writes…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/howardbaldwin/2014/01/30/cloud-costs-and-other-conundrums/

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