Hidden Costs Of Cloud Computing, Revealed

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The business case for cloud is compelling. Even after all the numbers for the obvious things get crunched, the question is, are there any “gotchas” that could result in higher costs than originally planned for? Business interruptions and outages are obvious risks, but there’s an even more insidious set of issues that could drive up costs.

A couple of years ago, I helped conduct a survey of e-commerce application managers, and one of the key questions we asked was how they find out about slowdowns or glitches that customers may be experiencing. The answer, overwhelmingly, was that these managers didn’t find out about web glitches at their sites until a customer phoned in or emailed a complaint. When you get hung up at a website, the people at the other end usually aren’t aware of your troubles…

So, as organizations move more and more operations to the cloud, the situation gets even more complicated. And, potentially costly to the business. It’s well known that consumers won’t stay at a site too long if it gets hung up — they’ll go to a competitor’s site…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2013/07/17/hidden-costs-of-cloud-computing-revealed/