Is The Cloud Always Cheaper Than On-Premises Or Colocated Infrastructure?

Cost is one of the major motivations for enterprise cloud migrations. Cloud platforms enable companies to deploy and scale infrastructure in line with changing demand, and with metered billing, companies only pay for resources they use. But that doesn't mean every cloud migration results in reduced cost. There's a class of cloud migrations that increases costs — those that fail.

An unsuccessful cloud migration is an expense with almost no return, and for smaller companies without dedicated DevOps departments, diving in at the deep end on an unmanaged cloud platform is a risk.

For businesses without the expertise and experience to maximize the value of the cloud, a managed cloud provider — especially one with close partnerships with service providers who have industry experience — can make the difference between a successful cloud deployment that realizes the potential cost savings and an expensive project that goes nowhere.

Consider a typical scenario: your company hosts its applications on colocated servers in a data center. Demand waxes and wanes, but your company always pays for the infrastructure required to service peak demand. There's no way to easily scale down.

You decide that migrating your applications to the cloud is a smart move. The infrastructure is inherently more scalable. You can bring down web servers when demand declines, and spin up replacements at a moment's notice during peak demand.

That's one scenario of many in which migrating to a public cloud platform will reduce infrastructure costs. But the fly in ointment here is that you have no one on staff who really understands how to maximize the cost benefits of a cloud platform. If your IT team treats the cloud in exactly the same way as physical infrastructure — there will be no savings. And that's assuming the migration is successful at all.

One of the biggest complaints about unmanaged cloud platforms — naming no names — is their complexity. There is a bewildering array of services, components, and techniques to grapple with. Unless your deployment is huge, you'll get no help from the vendor. It's easy enough to get a server up and running: but what about redundancy, automated scaling, security and authentication, service discovery, and so on.

Managed cloud provides an alternative that reduces the likelihood of failed migrations. Managed cloud platforms will support your business through its migration, and, on Steadfast's platform, you'll have access to our partners — service and solution providers with deep experience and knowledge building cloud solutions for business.

If you're worried about making the move to the cloud because your company lacks the in-house expertise to bring a migration project to a successful conclusion, choose a managed hosting platform capable of offering the support and direction that can empower you to maximize the value of your infrastructure investment.