Professional skills training will be the most expensive hidden cloud costs

Cloud pricing is one of the hottest topics in the industry so far, and calculating the cost of hidden clouds has become the most important factor. Experts believe that cloud computing expertise training for IT staff may be the most expensive hidden cloud costs. And that some business managers believe that their IT staff without training can be competent cloud computing operations, this assumption is too optimistic.

"I think some management people have a baseless optimism about the scope of virtualization certification when it comes to public or private clouds," said Jared Reimer, co-founder of Cascadeo, an IT consultancy.

Server virtualization and cloud interrelated, but in fact it is composed of different skill sets, cost structure and operation paradigm. However, companies do not take this distinction seriously.

"It's a contemptuous way: 'They're close, this guy is smart enough so he can learn quickly,' but I think that's not right," Reimer said. On the contrary, the costs of reprocessing monitoring software and trainers are often overlooked and it is too late to find them.

Trying to convert server virtualization training to cloud computing experience can lead to inappropriate specifications (often over-allocated) for instances, inappropriate configuration, or even confusion, all of which have a direct impact on the cost per month.

"It's also a mistake we often see when someone is experimenting with a prototype; they start an instance and are distracted and forgotten," Reimer said. "Six months later, someone finally said, 'What's this?' 'They've paid $ 500 a month for six months and they have not used it at all. "

New cloud customers often start with "transforming" the current virtualization environment, but that's a mistake, says Kris Bliesner, CEO of 2nd Watch, a cloud computing consulting firm and systems integrator.

"Businesses still do not realize they can reinvent something to make it more effective in the cloud," Bliesner said. "You have to think about refactoring and refactoring applications for some benefit."

For example, new cloud customers typically lack knowledge of the capabilities such as auto-expanding groups or content delivery networks (CDNs), provided by most cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

"If you take advantage of these features, you can use that to look at costs," said Matt Lipinski, an architect at Reed Elsevier Technology Services.

Server instances allocated from cloud computing environments offload traffic to the CDN can cut considerable costs.

"We unloaded as much traffic as possible on the CDN," said the director of engineering at an anonymous Fortune 100 company. "There is a hidden cost of getting your solution better, but it's on the right place."

Ultimately, businesses face the coordination of affordable IT salaries and cloud expertise to maximize cloud investment. Some may infer that Cloud Expertise is not worth the investment.

"I have to do everything and hire a team, and that's a cost that goes far beyond the operational costs of the cloud," he said. "It's not cheap; some companies may not want to spend that money."