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How Do I Estimate Cloud Computing Costs?

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Centilytics
How Do I Estimate Cloud Computing Costs?

Wondering how to estimate cloud computing costs, including direct, indirect, and potential costs, before migrating to the cloud? Worry not; you can invest in cloud cost optimizing services to calculate the cost of cloud computing and determine how it will impact your organization’s bottom line. You will need to calculate all direct costs, including server costs and indirect costs, such as the effect of potential downtime on employee productivity.

So, let’s explore ways to estimate your cloud computing costs!


Assess Your Direct Costs


Audit your IT infrastructure costs to understand the scale of your operations. It will help you assess what your new cloud environment will look like and have a baseline to calculate your potential costs. Calculate the total cost of owning, using, and maintaining the IT infrastructure on your premises.  


Then, determine the direct costs, such as the software and hardware that will make up your IT infrastructure. It will include your software licenses, warranties, physical servers, supplies, spare parts, maintenance contracts, and more. Pull payment invoices and related spreadsheets to calculate these costs. Determine how much database capacity, networking bandwidth, and storage you consume via your servers. Note the details of your infrastructure to use this information when calculating the cost of moving to the cloud.


You will also need to determine operational costs, such as maintenance labor, staff, real estate, facilities, internet connectivity, and more costs needed to upkeep your IT infrastructure. Lastly, consider the administrative costs, such as HR, Finance, and Procurement departments dedicated to managing your IT staff. You should also include outside service provider costs.

Calculate Indirect IT Costs


The biggest sources of indirect costs are loss of productivity and downtime. If your infrastructure is down, you will suffer from a loss of productivity from your employees and customers. Calculate these costs by reviewing your log files to ascertain how often you suffer downtime and for how long. Determine the revenue your company might lose during that time.


Determine Your Estimated Cloud Infrastructure Costs


Now, you will need to determine the estimated cost of your cloud infrastructure. Today, cloud providers have simplified their pricing structures to help prospective customers understand them easily. You can also use cloud cost optimization services to optimize the overall cost of computing.


Assess Cloud Migration Execution Costs


Next, you will need to estimate cloud migration costs. Depending on your IT infrastructure scope and your planes, the migration process can cost a lot. Consider the cost of moving your company’s data from on-premises servers to the cloud. It will include networking and labor costs as you will need to ensure your data is properly synced once you deploy to the cloud.

Some legacy software or applications are not ready for the cloud. You will need to estimate the cost of integrating and testing these apps as well. Moreover, you will have to determine and make changes necessary for them to perform optimally on the cloud.


Post-Migration Costs


Don’t forget to add your monthly infrastructure costs and all indirect costs you will need to pay to maintain and improve your cloud environment. Determine additional costs such as app testing, labor, security, training, compliance, integration, administration, and more.

Since cloud infrastructure is becoming more and more complex, cloud usage costs are becoming increasingly more opaque and challenging to track. Most organizations use a pay-for-what-you-use model, but it’s adding to the difficulty. If businesses monitor and manage their cloud use appropriately, they can end up saving on their budget.

However, it also makes it easy for the costs to spiral out of control since most decision-making is decentralized across an organization. Different departments, management, and people have access to services and can accrue costs with little to no accountability. It is why businesses will benefit from employing a cloud cost management strategy and cost optimization solutions.

With that said, some common factors that contribute to cloud usage costs include memory, storage, virtual machine instances, network traffic, web services, software license, training, and relevant support.

The Bottom Line


After you have calculated your overall cloud computing costs, the number might surprise you. Even though cost-saving is a huge reason why companies want to move to the cloud, often, people don’t estimate the costs correctly or proactively manage cloud migration and integration, which results in increased costs.

To counter this, you can invest in Centilytics’ cloud cost optimization services. We will maximize the ROI of your cloud resources and provide you with continuous cost optimization opportunities through resource rightsizing, instance reservation, instance scheduling, eliminating unassociated resources, identifying underutilized resources, and more.

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