Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Evaluating Costs in the Hybrid Environment

In order to make a smart economic choice about running workloads in your internal data center versus implementing a public or private cloud, you need to understand some of the subtleties of the cost factors. You also need to consider potential hidden costs associated with the cloud and, in particular, a hybrid cloud. There’s always a cost to change, including the following:

Management: Management of a hybrid environment brings additional challenges. You no longer need to simply manage the data center, or even one cloud, but instead multiple environments — on-premises, in your private cloud, and on one, if not multiple, public clouds. People, processes, and software can help with management, but they each have their own costs involved. See Chapter 4 for more details on service management.

Data transfer: When you transfer data, say from your premises to an application in a public cloud, costs are involved. This includes the fee to initially move your data to the cloud. These costs can quickly mount if you have large amounts of data requiring lots of bandwidth. Furthermore, depending on your cloud vendor, you can incur networking fees when moving data between different VMs within the same cloud (for instance, during backup or replication). ...