How well are the capabilities of Cloud resources really known? I recently spoke with an IT professional who builds custom applications for small businesses. These kinds of businesses represent the smallest business usually ignored by most service firms. They may purchase a server and it works for them for ten years or more. With that kind of longevity for hardware it takes careful consideration to evaluate the true cost of ownership, and why many times hosting your server in the Cloud may be a more cost effective option.
Without all the spin presented by Cloud providers there are some compelling costs beyond the purchase of hardware and software on a server. There is the cost to maintain the machine including applying upgrades for software patches, disaster recover, failover and network access. In response to these actual total cost of ownership features the Cloud based solutions can become a very compelling argument to the small business.
Often times the cost of the software you are using is also included in the service and if so is usually upgraded with newer releases at no additional cost. In this fashion the business continues to keep current with software capabilities while maintaining a low fixed regular cost.
My colleague then brings up some issues that can deter from cloud solutions:
- What about internet access? It can go down. It may not perform well in rural areas. It has to be included in the cost if a company does not already have a fast internet pipeline, assuming one is available.
- What about when you don’t want to apply updates? Many companies test updates in a sandbox prior to pushing them to their production machines because they sometimes break working applications by introducing bugs, or fixing bugs an application was built to depend upon.
- What about privacy of data?
Are these kinds of questions important enough to keep a small business on a tight budget from taking advantage of Cloud Resources? What do you think? Get into the conversation here or by sending email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben