Cost-efficiency and infinitely scalable – the two main perceived benefits of the cloud that has seen its usage soar within businesses of all sizes over recent years. There has been an almost overwhelming consensus that cloud services are the future, and for many good reasons. However, all cloud vendors are not the same and the promises that they seem to offer must be subject to scrutiny – a responsibility that falls to any organisation considering implementing such. Mark Adams, Co-founder, Inevidesk, explains what SMEs need to look out for.
One interpretation of the ‘cloud’ is that services are no longer associated with ugly, cumbersome physical hardware sitting in your office, but are simply now resources that can be accessed via the Internet – abstracted into some magical realm where stuff just happens. Another interpretation is that the ‘cloud’ is just that: cloudy, nebulous, beyond clear understanding. Both interpretations have attractions (end-users not having to think about the reality of how these services come to be – better to concentrate on their main priorities), but also dangers; opening up users to unconsidered costs, unknown levels of resiliency, murky understanding of resiliency, data protection and other potentially negative elements.
That’s not to say that SMEs should necessarily abandon the cloud and move back to on-prem solutions. Rather, they must review their cloud options with an informed eye and ask the right questions to ascertain whether such solutions are actually fit for purpose.
So, what should SMEs be looking for when it comes to the best long-term cloud investments?
The ‘low cost’ myths
The cloud isn’t a magical entity (though it would certainly like you to think of it in this way). It is, at the end of the day simply hosted infrastructure: hardware, cables, switches, firewalls, etc. And large-scale cloud services entail large-scale infrastructure. There are two key repercussions of this.
Large cloud vendors spend a lot of money to pre-populate their extensive data centres across the globe, enabling capacity in advance of demand. And so, while they may market their services as being low-cost with unlimited scaling potential, this is not necessarily the story. They need to both recoup their cost and make a profit from their investment. And as much of that pre-populated infrastructure might sit unused for long periods, that will require either running the hardware for a very long time indeed, charging a high price or, often, both.
Many cloud vendors also often charge customers by usage, meaning that monthly invoices can easily end up being far more expensive than initially anticipated. This is especially true in professions that generate large data and need high-performance computing, such as engineers, graphic designers, VFX and architects.
Holding on to the technical core of your business
What’s worse, is that when companies move their infrastructure over to Microsoft or Amazon, management is mostly taken out of the hands of businesses and they start to lose control. This is because to underpin these services a few select behemoth vendors buy up a vast amount of the world’s digital resources.
Taking the hardware out of the hands of end-users and IT management away from companies not only leads to the degradation of IT skillsets in-house but also a feeling of losing control over the technical core of their business operations, and leaving business end-users at the mercy of these big vendors (further entrenching already dangerous monopolies). But, tech providers aimed to do away with skillsets and experience that would increase reliance on their services in the long-term; essentially by making it harder for organisations to take the technical core of their businesses back. This ultimately puts them in a position where they will be forced to pay whatever fees the vendors wish.
Companies seeking cloud-based solutions need to ensure a careful evaluation process occurs to understand how it would impact their business and how much they would ultimately be spending in the long-term. By approaching the matter in this way, SMEs can try and avoid giving up the technical core of their business to tech giants.
High cost doesn’t mean 100% uptime
When you’re paying more for services, it would be natural for SMEs to presume that big vendors can maintain 100% uptime, particularly since they market limitless resources and multiple global points of presence. But this isn’t true.
In fact, there have been many instances where big tech services have experienced significant outages, causing widespread disruptions for organisations around the world. The larger and more complex an infrastructure, often the harder it is to identify problems when they occur. Scale and complexity are not the friends of troubleshooting. When the big guys go down, it’s likely to be a lot longer than a problem in a private cloud. And you are not going to get to talk to anyone whilst the incident is ongoing.
Every supplier and every infrastructure is going to experience downtime at some point. The key things here are frequency, recovery times and communication.
Maximising the benefits of cloud
Despite the shortcomings of many public cloud services, SMEs shouldn’t necessarily abandon this approach. There remain major benefits to cloud offerings to better support hybrid and remote working, improving agility and business resiliency. Rather, SMEs should take the time to understand the hosted services they are considering implementing, what the limitations and costs associated with each service are and whether these properly align with business goals and budgets.
They should ask themselves the following questions when exploring hosted solution:
- How is our current solution performing? Is it meeting expectations and providing a strong return on investment?
- How much will it cost, and do alternative cloud providers offer better value for money? (Be sure to look at a range of alternatives here – do not just plump for Azure or AWS, there are many smaller, excellent private cloud vendors around)
- Will this service ensure adequate service resiliency and data protection?
- What will be the ultimate return on your investment? Whether this means operational efficiency, Business Continuity or operational savings, it should serve the best interest of your business. (Be sure to consider this beyond a mere bottom line cost comparison of the tech solutions under consideration)
Maintaining transparency
Transparency is vitally important to any organisation looking to move their services to the cloud. Being able to understand – to a reasonable extent – the underlying infrastructure, its performance capabilities, its resiliency, recovery capabilities, what it’s going to cost you and having someone real to talk to about all this, including when there is a problem, should be critical criteria.
The actual key to achieving that is to either have relevant in-house knowledge and expertise to oversee your tech stack, or a trusted, expert consultancy that is not captured by any one vendor. Without this, you may well get lost in the cloud.
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