Let’s talk money for a moment. I think it’s fair to say that the advantages of most services lies with the physical attributes of the service being provided and it’s up to the customer to determine the value for themselves. It may also be fair to say that these attributes or features/benefits if you will are the primary focus from a sales standpoint with the cost of the service being one of the less desirable aspects for the customer. This is where the AWS solution sets itself apart from other services. The financial strength of the Amazon product is actually one if its biggest draw cards.
In an upcoming article we are going to discuss 10 of the reasons why our network of experts are committed to the AWS cloud over any other solutions that are available. However firstly we’d like to quantify the financial aspects, nailing down to the nuts and bolts making it easy for you to assess your own project scenarios.
Elasticity is the important key word to use when describing the Amazon cloud. The elastic use of hardware allows for a scalable pricing structure, essentially you only ever pay for what you use. As demand increases and more resources are required, the necessary resources are applied using automated virtualisation. Then as demand decreases and less resources are required, the resources are shut down eliminating the need to ever pay for reserve hardware capacity.
The following figure depicts the basic usage comparison.
Important Note: There are a number of parameters to take into consideration when preparing financial projections comparing cloud based infrastructure to traditional IT.
Below is an excerpt from an ITOC document that defines the costs companies would typically face when investing in traditional infrastructure compared to that of AWS.
The truth is that most of the traditional IT costs described here can be extremely significant and in today’s era of technology there are simply better solutions for your business.
The cloud offers operational excellence for mission-critical applications, resources are monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Amazon also publishes a service health dashboard to provide continuous, real-time visibility into operational performance.
There’s also the problem that many enterprises simply don’t have the capital budgets required to build, extend, or replace IT infrastructure in a capital-constrained environment. As a result, many are simply foregoing important projects within the business due to a lack of accessible capital. It is not a good reflection of the effectiveness of your IT if you are side-lining important projects within your business which you could otherwise be giving priority to.
The evidence of financial benefits are overwhelming – check out the Case Studies section of the AWS website. Next week we’ll be making this easy for you by dissecting the financial characteristics of one of our recent projects.
