Cloud computing Services: Leasing vs. self-building

Any financial advisor will tell you that ownership is better than leasing, but usability is overlooked when it comes to cloud computing.

More and more businesses are paying their subscription fees monthly to cloud providers to quickly access the latest and best infrastructure, platforms, and applications they cannot afford to buy. Now, leasing it platforms, applications in the operational dimension market is very hot, enterprises can get anything that services (XAAS), they expect these services to reduce IT costs.

According to TechTarget's survey of 1500 IT staff, we found that almost three-fourths (73%) of IT people use public cloud services primarily because of cost savings.

But in the long run, cloud services will ultimately be much more expensive than local it costs, which is why manufacturers have created a cloud version of their products. Software as a service (SaaS) provides vendors with a reliable source of revenue, and they do not have to release their products once in two years.

"If you believe in marketing culture, you think you're going to move everything to the clouds tomorrow," said Sean McDermott, CEO of Windward IT solutions. "This is not the case and there are many factors to consider." ”

Expensive cloud

Mature enterprises, there are many cross system integration, what to put into the cloud is a complex problem, the final answer is usually to return to their own data center.

Windward IT Solutions consider moving their office and SharePoint environments to the cloud, and you can run e-mail through managed exchange. But specific applications, such as their custom accounting software, cannot be integrated into a cloud-based Exchange version.

In addition, by hosting exchange through a cloud service provider, the cost of uninterrupted subscriptions is approximately 9 dollars per user per month, plus the Exchange ActiveSync cost, they have about 120 employees, a total of 1600 U.S. dollars per month, or 19200 dollars a year.

"I have to buy a server for accounting software and other applications, so in this case it makes more sense to build your own private cloud from capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating costs (Opex)," McDermott said.

Microsoft Exchange Online Services charge 8 U.S. dollars per user per month, and there is no data comparison between the total cost of owning a local Exchange server and using the cloud based exchange. Microsoft also declined to provide exchange online customers to discuss this issue.

Instead, in a January 2013 case study, a U.S. West Coast non-profit organization was moving from an older version of Exchange Server to Exchange Online, a spokesperson told us directly on Microsoft Office 365, Lync and SharePoint, For equipment and software upgrades, they want to avoid the cost of 40,000 of dollars in capital spending. According to Microsoft's report, the organization pays 1500 dollars a month.

Some simple mathematical calculations can tell us that in just two years they paid a total of 1500 dollars a month to avoid capital support for 40,000 dollars.

' This is not to say that cloud services are not worth buying, ' says Carl Brooks, a 1 Tier, a market analyst.

"You're going to pay the same amount on Oracle, and the same operating costs as the internal data center on Amazon Web services," Brooks says, "So the reason it is using cloud services is not to save money, but to use it for other inherent advantages of cloud computing." ”

This applies to all external applications across organizations, where the enterprise actually spends the most money, about 7% to 8% for management fee service providers, 1% to 2% for infrastructure as services, and 2% to 3% for SaaS.

Brooks added: "These costs are pushing real work into service providers, and another 90% of the budget is used to deal with basic issues: salaries, software, existing data centers." ”

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)