Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing

Computerworld - At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility.

But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.

While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they will have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services.

Moving and storing data

It can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to move large volumes of data onto public cloud services and to store that data over long periods of time. Many companies might not realize the expenses involved.

"A one-time move can [cost] thousands of dollars," says Hernan Alvarez, senior director of IT and operations at WhitePages Inc., a Seattle-based company that provides online contact information for more than 200 million people and 15 million businesses.

The cost of using the cloud is only an unexpected cost "if you don't fully comprehend the cloud model," says Hernan Alvarez, senior director of IT and operations at WhitePages.

Much of the unexpected cost of moving data is for network bandwidth -- cloud providers might charge upload and download fees -- and other costs, including internal labor. "People think there are no labor costs [with the cloud], but as you scale up [to] handle workload, there's a complexity with managing large numbers of cloud instances, just like managing a large number of servers," Alvarez says. Another big cost is for long-term storage of data on the cloud. "When you consider the data growth rates, over the next three years the life-cycle cost of data can be really high," Alvarez says. "You continue to pay for that every month" when data is stored in the cloud.

But the cost of using the cloud "is only an unexpected cost if you don't fully comprehend the cloud model," he says. "If you think about CPUs, capacity and storage [needs] and chart that over time, you can get a pretty good handle on what the costs are and if you can do it more cost-effectively internally."

WhitePages explored using the cloud for data backup, but after extensively evaluating eight vendors, the company determined it would be much too expensive -- as much as three to four times what it would cost to keep it internal, Alvarez says. So the company opted to handle long-term data storage internally, on its private cloud.

In general, though, using public cloud services for purposes other than storage eliminates the need to deploy and maintain the applications internally. The company has been using public cloud services for about two years and now uses 11 different cloud-based applications from service providers including Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, ADP, WebEx and Yammer. This has led to cost savings that greatly outweigh any of the unexpected costs, Alvarez says.

Integrating apps from multiple vendors

Pacific Coast Building Products, a Rancho Cordova, Calif., provider of building products, wants to start using cloud computing in a big way, and has evaluated cloud services from several providers. But the company has limited its cloud usage so far because the economics are not quite there yet, says Mike O'Dell, CIO.

The costs of integrating two key applications stopped Pacific Coast Building Products from going with the cloud in a big way, says Mike O'Dell, CIO.

One of the reasons for this is the difficulty of integrating software applications from disparate vendors on the cloud, and the fact that providing this integration on its own would drive up the cost of cloud computing for Pacific Coast.

For example, the company uses Microsoft Exchange for email and Cisco's Unity Unified Messaging for voicemail, and is interested in using both of these applications as cloud services. "Integration between [these applications] in the cloud, at least the last time we looked, wasn't there," O'Dell says.

Without the integration, users wouldn't be able to leverage some of the capabilities they have now, such as automatic deletion of voicemail messages on their phones when they receive the messages via email.