Many businesses are considering cloud computing services to keep their data safe and easily accessible. No matter where your employees are, they can easily access any important documents that they need. It can allow businesses to hire more remote resources and build hybrid setups for their office. But if you are on the fence about cloud computing, the cost can be the biggest deciding factor. Most business owners will consider how much something costs, and how much money it can save for them.
So, how can you calculate the cost of cloud computing for your business? There are many direct and indirect costs involved and you need to break it all down. For instance, you may have to call the Cox customer service number to get an upgrade on your current internet package. There may be costs for potential downtimes resulting in reduced employee productivity. So, this article is going to talk about all the potential factors that can affect your cloud computing budget.Â
Current IT Infrastructure Audit
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your current IT infrastructure is important before you can understand what your requirements are. The TCO includes all direct and indirect costs to set up and maintain the IT infrastructure of your company. The direct costs mean the money you have to shell out upfront and can have a direct impact on your cash revenues. While the indirect costs are much more difficult to calculate. If you don’t understand how much your in-house IT infrastructure costs, it can be hard to compare the price with cloud computing as well.
Cost of Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Once you understand your on-premises IT infrastructure cost, it is time to determine your cloud infrastructure costs. The potential costs can depend upon the networking requirements, storage, and database capacity that you require. Moreover, the service or provider you use can also change your costs. It was hard to determine the costs of cloud computing when it first became popular. Most people didn’t understand their requirements and the breakup of costs from providers was also complicated.
However, most cloud computing service providers have official cost calculators that you can use. Google, Amazon, Microsoft Azure, IBM, and Rackspace all have online cost calculators. They can give you estimates of your cost depending upon the requirements you enter in the form. The pricing structures have been simplified so that regular and non-tech savvy people can also understand them.
Cloud Migration Costs
The cost calculators can help you cover a lot of the direct costs of setting up the cloud infrastructure. However, the indirect costs can also include migration costs to the cloud. There might be a potential downtime as you move to the new system. It can take some time to get used to and may also affect employee productivity in the meantime. You have to move data and apps to the cloud and might need technical support with that as well.
Data Moving Costs
Many cloud computing services can charge money to move your data to the cloud. And this is probably the most important step of migration. You cannot risk losing data so the networking costs for this aren’t something you can avoid. When you are moving from legacy systems to the cloud, labor costs can also involve data synchronization costs.
It can be a complicated process because you will need some time to transfer the entire data to the cloud. And you may still need to use your legacy systems while that happens. That is why the data needs to be in sync the whole time. Data backups are thus necessary to maintain data integrity and reduce the risk of losing anything.
Getting Apps Ready for the Cloud
You will need to integrate all your apps with the cloud as well and most apps aren’t set for it from the onset. For smoother running operations, you need to test them beforehand. Whether you are using older legacy software or ERP systems, you need to consider the costs of the integration testing and any delays that may happen because of it.
You cannot risk the apps not working when you have moved on from the legacy systems. All of this takes time and money and is an indirect cost to consider.
Conclusion
There can be other tangible and intangible costs that can affect your budget. You still have to consider any possible consultant fees and approximate the post-migration costs such as maintenance and improvement. There is a standard monthly or annual infrastructure cost you have to pay to the provider as well.
