Users warned of rising cloud costs
rate, my guess is most South African cloud operators will be increasing their prices in 2023.
“The rampant dollar inflation and the broad 25% rand/dollar exchange rate deterioration have also not yet been taken into account, and I predict cloud increases of 35-50% in the next 12 to 18 months,” said Cruise.
He added that one survey, revealed over 80% of IT leaders said they have begun to cut down on cloud spending.
“There are several reasons for the escalating costs. First, as the hype around the public cloud grew, many businesses started migrating to the cloud without doing the necessary proper planning.”
He said careful planning and development, using optimised architectures instead of what seems to work for others, was a way to mitigate costs.
“The benefits cloud offers are numerous – increased agility and efficiency, long-term hardware efficacy, greater security, convenience and scalability. And yes, it all comes at a cost.”
Cruise said, at first glance, managing your own infrastructure looks less expensive.
“Cloud adds up over time and amounts to a larger number than the once-off cost of on-premises infrastructure. But when making these calculations, many forget to add the hidden costs.
“The expertise needed to run the infrastructure, the software and hardware warranties and software licensing or subscriptions that need to be renewed, and the inevitable cost of eventually replacing hardware.”
At Routed, however, we’ve decided to absorb these costs, Cruise said.
“In fact, we haven’t upped our
prices since our inception – the benefits of an increasing economy of scale.
“We are more akin to ‘enterprise IT’, and our IT Channel Partners are less likely to suffer from the inflationary pressures that the native hyperscale cloud is subject to.”
“Whatever cloud solution you choose, know that proper planning can prevent unreasonable costs later.”