Breaking Down Cloud Economics

One of the most confusing issues that a business faces when moving to cloud services is understanding and planning for the costs and the economic impact on the business. Operational performance, security, economics, and flexibility all have a great impact on an organization's cloud strategy. Striking the right balance among public cloud services, private cloud, and the data center requires a pragmatic planning process. Planning must take into account the needs of a variety of business units as well as an understanding of the future business strategy. A customer‐facing financial application in the heavily regulated financial industry may be better suited for a private cloud environment. Some pragmatic workloads fit perfectly into the infrastructure as a service model. Cloud pricing changes constantly which makes it difficult for a business to be able to do the type of financial planning that management requires.