On the tenth day of Techmas Waterstons gave to me…

The cloud is not just someone else’s computer. Well, it kind of is, but if you treat it like an on-premises computer it will get expensive, quickly.

While the cloud can support traditional workloads as-is, it offers entirely new ways to consume services which are usually more cost-effective.

Lifting and shifting your servers to ‘infrastructure-as-a-service’ will work but moving off-the-shelf products to ‘software-as-a-service will’ save you on maintenance, and often on price, as you’re paying a single fee instead of layering on-premises software costs on top of cloud server hosting.

For your in-house apps you should consider refactoring your services to run on ‘platform-as-a-service’ instead, for largely the same reasons.

Once you’ve moved services to the cloud it requires a close eye on usage and costs to avoid budget overrun.

On-premises, you might leave a few extra virtual machines running and think “Who cares? I already paid for the hardware.”

In the cloud your vendor cares, and they will bill you for every second of it.

This works both ways, though - if you don’t need a system running 24/7, why pay for it? Shut it down and let another customer pay for the resources instead.

There are lots of ways to get creative with monitoring and automation to make sure you’re only paying for what you actually need.

To find out more about technology and cloud services, check out our tech consulting page here: https://www.waterstons.com/services/technology-consulting