It’s incredible what you can do with your data centers, the ease of access to functionality, tools and such is increasing daily, and already stunning. It does come with a cost.
I was reading this article from DBTA and I think they hit the nail on the head for why cloud services may surprise some people when it comes to managing costs.
“The study finds that increasing database licensing and support costs, or the belief that these costs will increase, are holding back data managers from expanding their database assets to keep up with business growth.”
We’re finding this to be the case – that licensing and support costs can quickly increase well beyond expectations (and therefor budget) because of the breadth of options available.
“Hey, let’s try this bigger server…”
“Hey, this analytics tool is great, let’s set up a quick app that we can push our data through…”
“Let’s just make a quick copy of our database on a new server so we have a backup…”
Licensing, support, management, security… it all comes into play as things expand. It’s like an IT Pro Buffet. You can just keep adding and the only time you pay the piper is when, literally, you pay the piper.
The point about the costs is important though. Those second and third items – support, management – are kickers. They end up being a bit of a surprise potentially. You end up getting additional help, or taking more time from existing help, or having to learn new skills… those are more soft costs associated with the expansion of your systems.
We’ve talked here for years about the issue of departmental databases (it all started with Access, sigh…) and now it’s moved to the cloud and the ease of which you can set up a new database, new servers, new applications, with the click of a button.
There are a good number of surprises in store though as systems, and really wide solutions, start to spin up. That departmental solution may seem pretty innocuous while it’s being set up and is running. But when they become dependent on it, then something happens and they need help, SOMEONE has to drop everything, get up to speed with their unique environment and provide the help. That’s just in a triage situation.
As more solutions start relying on a wide array of tools to perform (hadoop, nosql, SQL Server, analytics tools, import/export routines, storage…) there is more skill, awareness and knowledge required of the tech staff to support these solutions. I don’t say this as a “oh, boo hoo” type of thing, but rather it needs to be a discreet planning point in the application and solution budget cycle. Otherwise, you can really get a big surprise that you don’t have too many options to use to address, other than paying the bill unexpectedly.