Cloud has inspired almost as much evangelical fervor as open source computing, particularly in the heady 2000s. The advent of cloud computing seemed to render traditional enterprise software vendors as out-of-date as telegraph operators. The monolithic process of releasing software every 18 months wasn’t fast enough for business, running your own servers became as fashionable as generating your own electricity, and the expense involved restricted technology access to the wealthiest businesses.
Cloud computing represented a true democratization of enterprise IT, allowing small companies to compete with bigger rivals without breaking the bank to buy servers, storage and software. Tens of millions of dollars for the right to walk onto the playing field were no longer required.
The other promise of cloud computing was of a more transparent and equitable business model.
In one of my first interviews as an IT reporter, in 2003, I asked the chief technology officer of a large health IT organization to define enterprise software. “It’s when they can’t tell you the price of the software upfront,” he said.
Sure, this lack of transparency reflected the complexity of the forecasting applications on offer, but also showed that the dominant sales model gave more power to vendors than customers.
The emergence of profitable cloud-native businesses both threatened existing business models and inspired business transformation. The agility and innovation made possible by cloud computing inspired many businesses to move their IT stacks from their own server rooms or data centers to the cloud.
The law of universal gravitation as applied to the cloud
By 2020, however, the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Businesses have reaped the benefits of relatively lower costs and more frequent innovation. And with the lion’s share of IT spending at most companies moving into the cloud, cost – and cost transparency – matters. Yet, the transparency promised by the cloud revolution has largely failed to materialize.
As was the case with the previous generation of technology, obfuscation isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and it begins with Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. Pricing structures at legacy cloud providers punish moving data from one cloud to another. By intentionally making the cost of putting data into their clouds as low as possible, while making it prohibitively expensive to move data out to interact with systems in different clouds—a concept known as data gravity—they are walling in their customers. This is an explicit strategy to make their clouds “sticky” and keep forecasting applications from moving to other clouds.
But the reality is that businesses want and need to operate in different cloud environments for many reasons. Not to mention, who wouldn’t want to cut 10, 30, or even 80 percent of cloud costs if possible?
How to Make Cloud Pricing More Transparent
This article on “How to Make Cloud Pricing More Transparent” is originally published at https://www.eweek.com/cloud/how-to-make-cloud-pricing-more-transparent
eWEEK CLOUD PERSPECTIVE: It used to be nearly impossible to compare cloud costs because different providers typically have their own nomenclature for cloud features, define services differently and offer different tiers of services that don’t line up with one another. Forget apple-to-apple comparisons, cloud price bake-offs were more like contrasting apples to peach cobblers. But help is here.