Public cloud providers are expensive, and I’m not alone in that opinion. Civo, a company specializing in public cloud services, recently published a report on the state of the cloud market. Civo surveyed more than 500 professionals in the cloud industry to analyze current trends. Their report focuses specifically on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services, the three largest cloud providers. According to their analysis, this year’s cloud computing market now faces “significant challenges.” Prices are becoming more of a burden for enterprises than a cost-saving opportunity.
Cloud was never cheap
One of the main points of my last book was that cloud computing never was and never would be cheap despite being marketed as a less expensive alternative to traditional on-premises deployments. It took most of us a calculator and a few minutes to realize that. This does not mean cloud computing offers no benefits to enterprises. One is agility, or the ability to provision and change IT systems on demand. Another is the ability for those systems to scale up quickly via virtual services versus pallets of servers sitting at the loading docks of your data center.
However, if you can’t find the business value, the cloud will not be the best solution. Indeed, droves of enterprises and software companies have returned to on-premises deployments due to hardware price reductions that cut costs by as much as one-third. That works if your usage is stable, and your business doesn’t gain much value from the cloud’s agility and scalability. For most enterprises, those are the primary value drivers.