For Enterprise IT, Cloud Pricing Isn’t Simple

Grazed from CIOInsight. Author: Samual Greengard.

It’s no secret that cloud computing has changed the dynamics of business and IT. But along with significant gains, there have been plenty of growing pains. Understanding pricing models and increasingly complex business agreements is at the center of the challenges for CIOs.

"Cloud has long been thought as analogous to electricity, allowing consumers to ‘plug-in’ and consume IT resources, paying only for what they need. Unfortunately, the IaaS market is far, far away from being a utility, and there is a confusing array of pricing methods, chargeable line items, metrics and pre-configured bundles," observes Owen Rogers, cloud economist at 451 Research…

In fact, comparing like-for-like offerings and fully understanding the pros and cons of different cloud offerings is currently a "nightmarish task," he says. Different providers use different and often confusing terminology, and most claim that their cloud products offer the best value. As a result, 451 Research has recently introduced a cloud pricing guidebook, dubbed the Cloud Pricing Codex, which attempts to simplify an increasingly complex cloud environment and help CIOs more accurately gauge the true costs of cloud computing services. The Codex breaks down pricing for a number of factors, including service bundling, billable attributes, usage metrics, how charges appear and how they are measured…

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