Hmm, I wonder? I had to catch a train up to London the other week on business. A chance came up for a meeting I had been trying to get for some time. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, the person I wanted to see was passing through London and I had the chance to grab a couple of hours of their time face to face. Old fashioned guy that I am, sometimes web meetings and video conferencing just won’t do – you need to meet in person.
Next day I arrived at my local train station, bought a return ticket to London and five minutes later boarded the train. The cost of the basic ticket I bought was £99.50.
This hurried trip reminded me that I had to visit London again the following month and that I hadn’t yet sorted my ticket out. I called the office from the train and got a colleague to go on the Internet and pre-book my return ticket for a month ahead. They called me back to say it was booked at a cost of £30. Same trains, same day of the week, no holidays or anything else to confuse matters. Two identical ordinary working days. A price difference of over 330%. Clearly it pays to plan ahead when using the train.
As I sipped perhaps the worst latte ever made, and nibbled a pastry with the consistency of hard rock, I glanced through the windows and watched the clouds drifting by. Of course, you can’t avoid clouds these days if you’re in IT. Public, private, hybrid or whatever, some form of cloud implementation is on the horizon for all commercial IT users. One of the great benefits we are promised is ‘elasticity’, the ability to rapidly add additional resources in the event of a sudden requirement. What price will we pay for these ‘cloud bursts’ or ‘overdrafts’ as they are known. My elasticity in responding to a sudden meeting requirement had cost me 330%+ more than if I had planned the meeting in advance. Will we be paying the same premium for IT resources bought at short notice?
Of course we will. Emergency facilities like your bank overdraft cost more than planned requests for credit. Air side shops, excluding the delights of duty free, charge more than high street shops, because there is nowhere else you can buy something before you get on the plane. Adding in resource from your Cloud provider at short notice will cost more than planned, contracted resource.
To avoid costs running away in what could be a panic or emergency situation for your business, the better you can predict and manage what resources you need and when will therefore be critical. Capacity management, capacity planning and strategic IT service management disciplines will become ever more important if you are to do this successfully and avoid unnecessary spend.
How high will the premium be? Time will tell. If you’ve got an experience of the cost differential between planned and cloud burst costs feel free to share them.
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer
No comments:
Post a Comment