There’s been a great deal of column inches devoted to the price war waging amongst public cloud providers. In January, Google claimed it was up to 40% less expensive than AWS for compute resources. That same month, AWS reduced pricing of EC2 instances by 5%. Microsoft then waded in with a 17% price cut for its D-series virtual machines (VMs).
More recently, Oracle threw its hat into the cloud ring.
Overall, entry level cloud pricing is reported to have fallen by 66% in the last 2 years. Public cloud prices are expected to fall by a further 14% between now and 2020.
Although the price cuts may have slowed, 451 Research believes the war has only just begun. The market watcher, which publishes the Cloud Price Index, forecasts cloud pricing to decline another 5% over the next year.
So what does all this mean for your business?
Avoiding cloud lock in
Certainly, pricing can be difficult to compare across providers given the various takes on consumption models and metering. Moreover, price is just one part of the equation. Overall value and suitability for workloads are also key factors making cloud strategy a case of ‘different clouds for different crowds’ when it comes to reliability, scalability and security.
There’s lots of people that will have heard of someone getting locked in on a higher price contract for public cloud services. If you can’t move from a specific cloud provider because you are tied into a contract, or because moving workloads would be too costly, time consuming or near impossible from a technical perspective, the fact is your business won’t be in a position to take advantage of the price drops being seen.
Furthermore, the chances are that your IT teams have to put much more work into protecting your organisation than is recognised. Each time a line of business (LoB) decides to put a set of VMs into the public cloud and swipes the company credit card, the cost on the invoice is not the price the company pays. There’s additional work required and some significant risks to be factored in.
For example, IT still has to ensure the operating system has been built properly, the data is secure and the application is deployed in multiple availability zones. Otherwise, if that zone goes down, your service dies.
Put yourself in the driving seat
Just imagine if you could seamlessly deploy any application on any cloud. Control, extend and deploy your security policy no matter where you run the workload. Provide full audit and compliance for your applications, real time usage and consumption, and help predict future application deployment costs.
You could de-risk your move to the cloud and prevent lock-in. Sound good?
With a service orchestration platform in place, IT can sit between the corporate credit card and the cloud provider and take the service the latter provides and package it into a service IT provides with all the other cool stuff that IT does. Moreover, with the right platform in place, it’s possible to gain an accurate view of the costs involved, make a comparison, and prevent LoBs running bad code or building silos of OS stacks.
There’s never been a better time for your business to benefit from multi-cloud innovation and competitive pricing. Look here to learn more.
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