How SMBs Avoid These 5 Unknown Public Cloud Costs

What is surprising is the annual cost of public cloud consumption. Rightscale’s 2018 State of the Cloud Report shows that nearly 30% of SMBs spend more than $6 million annually on public cloud consumption. What’s more, as cloud users gain maturity with the public cloud, they shift to multi-cloud landscapes provided by more than one service provider. In fact, SMBs typically utilize at least five clouds, while larger enterprises tend to utilize even more.

The more cloud environments you operate the more it costs and the harder it becomes to grow your business. Here are 5 unknown costs attached to the public cloud that can make it difficult to determine the true cost and ROI of your cloud usage and what you can do to limit your reliance on public cloud while still realizing the same benefits.

Transactional costs

Most public cloud providers charge a nominal fee every time you access your data. These fees are miniscule, not more than pennies per hour, but cloud providers charge them in hopes that high volume will balance out the low cost.

Although it may seem a small price to pay for data access between 9 and 5, the addition of supplementary network systems and remote worker connections can quickly result in a 24/7 access to your data.

Ingress Costs

On top of the fees charged by public cloud service providers, you will also have to contend with the potentially massive ingress cost of moving onto a public cloud. You’ll have to pay your team to move your business data from one network to another. Let’s not forget the revenue that you lose while your team is busy migrating data.

Egress Costs

The cost of egress from a public cloud provider can be as high, if not higher than the cost of ingress. Public cloud providers often make it difficult to move data off their solution and many SMEs can become locked in.

Additional Support Systems

Often additional elements are required to operate the application securely. Therefore, SMBs must also factor in the additional cost of supplementary support systems, such as:

• Security – Generally, the security offered by most public cloud service providers is strictly for the data center itself. Therefore, users must provide their own security to prevent unwanted intrusions into your network.
• Patching – Manually patching across providers is a time-consuming task – many automated patch management solutions are only somewhat effective at patching hybrid environments.
• Back Up – Many public cloud service providers lack effective monitoring and data management tools for on-premises backup applications.

Resilience and Disaster Recovery

Many public cloud service providers charge per GB of data traffic between the domains they use to keep failover environments in a different region or availability zone. The cost of this traffic can add up quickly. In fact, many public cloud services are charged per GB each time a server speaks to a different domain, as well as an additional cost per GB to send data over the Internet.

Benefits of Bare Metal Cloud

It’s possible to avoid the 5 unknown public cloud costs with bare metal cloud, which is a single-tenant environment that offers advanced security, customization, better overall performance, hybrid deployment, and significantly lower big data transfer costs.

A bare metal cloud provides a physically isolated tool in single and multi-tenant data center environment, which means it’s private but comes with the same accessibility as a public cloud.

The single-tenant environment of bare metal cloud also enables you to customize your dedicated server with zero resource restriction, which means faster load times and optimal handling of traffic. What’s more, bare metal cloud isolates your data, which enhances security by default.

The bare metal cloud is the best way to avoid the litany of costs associated with the public cloud. It offers custom-designed hardware and applications created to meet your unique needs. It also provides better performance, security, and resource allocation than traditional environments.

The more data your SMB needs to manage, the more you need a dedicated cloud solution. Bare metal cloud is the dedicated solution that will keep your cloud computing costs low, and help you grow your business.

About the author

A serial entrepreneur, Lucas Roh is the Founder and CEO of Bigstep. He has built several businesses including Hostway Corporation, Affinity, and Lentiq and has 20+ years of experience not counting his tenure as a Ph.D. at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Article originally posted on Business2Community.