Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

The Economics of the Data Center

It’s hard for most organizations to accurately predict the actual costs of running any given application in the data center. A particular server may be used to support several different applications. For example, how do you accurately judge how many personnel resources are dedicated to a single application? Although there may be a particular month when your staff is updating one application, those same staff members may be troubleshooting a different application in another month. In some organizations, there may have been attempts to tie computing costs to specific departments, but if so, the model is likely to have been very rough.

Consider, as a simple example, the use of e-mail. Some departments are very heavy users, whereas others barely touch it at all. Pockets within a single department may be heavy users. Although technically you can monitor individual use, doing so would require more overhead than it’s worth. In addition, overhead costs associated with supporting customers when they forget their password or accidently delete an important message can surpass expectations and add to the overall costs of running an application such as e-mail.

Listing the costs

In order to prepare for your evaluation of on-premises data center costs, you need to look at the costs that are directly and indirectly related to the application or type of workload you want to move to the cloud (public or private). Some of these indirect costs are hard to evaluate, ...