Enterprise CIOs with public and private cloud options face a challenge. On the one hand, they have the promise of scalability of public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS). On the other, they face a very real cost issue with these services.
Many CIOs end up sticking with private clouds due to perceived concerns about cost, security, and reliability. But they don’t need to.
In conjunction with the right tools for crunching massive amounts of usage data, Amazon’s public cloud and offerings from Google, Microsoft, and HP can provide cost-effective, scalable, and reliable cloud compute resources.
Here then are three myths of Amazon’s Public Cloud dispelled:
1. It’s expensive. Public cloud services can be expensive when utilized inefficiently. Instances are underutilized and customers don’t take advantage of Reserved Instances, which provide cost-savings benefits of up to 71% over on-demand rates. With reserved instances, companies pay a reservation fee for an instance up front and a much lower hourly rate for use of that instance.
2. You have to pay for what use, not what you need. In reality, “companies can pay for what they need, rather than what they use,” says Zev Laderman, CEO and Co-Founder of Newvem, a cloud usage analytics company.
IT departments historically invested in servers and storage only to discover that they were vastly underutilizing these resources. The same issue is arising when companies use the public cloud; instead of getting the benefits of on-demand scalability, they end up with a large number of underutilized instances.
Fortunately, much as virtualization enabled companies to improve their server utilization, new cloud management tools enable companies to optimize their public cloud usage, improving utilization and reducing cost.
As a result, CIOs can capture cost-savings, run more efficient clouds, and free up precious IT resources.
3. Public clouds are unreliable. Although Amazon has had several high profile outages, these outages need not have affected customers who utilized the public cloud infrastructure correctly.
With new zone support, the ability to distribute workloads across multiple geographic locations, and the ability to bring up instances across zones, public cloud infrastructure is very reliable.
Public clouds like Amazon Web Services need not be just for consumer Internet companies like Netflix and Pinterest.
Enterprise CIOs should consider the cost and labor saving benefits of public clouds when used with cloud management services that analyze potential cost spiral issues, utilization issues, and security vulnerabilities.
Newvem launched a new tool that helps enterprises take advantage of cost effective AWS services. Their Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool can help enterprise CIOs:
- Ensure that reserved instances meet cost and performance expectations
- Identify consistent On-Demand usage that can be shifted to Reserved Instances
- Track Reserved Instance expiration dates and recommend actions for renewal and scale up and down
Just as traditional systems management solutions like Oracle, BMC, CA, and IBM solutions enable CIOs and their operations teams to manage their private clouds, Newvem enables CIOs to onboard and improve AWS cloud usage.
Cloud analysis services can also pinpoint design flaws and make recommendations to improve reliability and ensure that if an outage does occur, services can rapidly be brought back online.
By leveraging an appropriate cloud management service, enterprise CIOs can benefit from the widely available public cloud offerings.
David Feinleib is the author of The Big Data Landscape and The Big Data 100. He provides advisory and consulting services to buyers and vendors, including Newvem, to optimize the adoption of technology for competitive advantage.
