Counting the cost of cloud computing

Among the benefits of cloud computing are lower infrastructure costs, reduced time to market and greater flexibility, with no need for enterprises to buy, install and maintain IT infrastructure and software. It can allow companies to become more agile and entrepreneurial, while the cloud computing vendor can deliver economies …

[Nate Amsden]

not pay for what you use

At least from an IaaS stand point there is very limited pa for what you use - it's pay for what you provision. Which is the killer thing for cloud. With one exception that I am aware of all of the IaaS solutions do not allow you to provision pools of resources and share them like you would in an internal "cloud". It really makes "cloud" a lot less cost effective than it otherwise could be.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: not pay for what you use

also the one exception I can think of is not an on demand cloud it's a cloud where you sign a contract up front for some set period of time where you have pools of resources which you can provision however you want. My company didn't sign up for it since it cost 4x more than building the infrastructure ourselves but the option was there.

I'm sure there are plenty of orgs out there that are not efficient, just yesterday one of my friends was telling me some stories about a group in his big company - they go out and buy $2M of hardware for example and find out for some reason or another it doesn't work and they just put it on a shelf - not used - not returned- just wasted. Happens quite a bit there apparently. Kind of sad.

[Aaron Em]

Sad, hell

There's a certain appeal in working some place where two million bucks is pocket change...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sad, hell

You should have been at AT&T in the 1990's. $2 million wouldn't have even generated a line-item in the R&D budget.

[Ole Juul]

What is driving this push to the cloud?

I just wonder what, or who, is actually driving this push to the cloud that causes all these discussions about vague and variable benefits. Are users asking for this service, or are there companies pushing to sell it? If the latter, then I'm suspicious.

[Aaron Em]

Re: What is driving this push to the cloud?

Well, who do they quote in articles like this one? People with technical chops and user-facing responsibilities, or PR flack types who talk for a living?

[Anonymous Coward]

A small correction..

"Management consultant James Carlini recently produced a useful checklist of a dozen criteria for cloud computing procurement."

No, the checklist has been around for quite some time and it's for all technology procurement, not just cloud computing.

According to Mr. Carlini, the yardstick's focus on selection criteria has been used for clients throughout the years as well as integrated into the Executive Masters courses he taught at Northwestern University.

The author's preception was probably "clouded" by his overzealous support of the subject.