Are you considering moving to the cloud? You aren’t alone. All the hype would have you believe that companies are moving assets to the cloud in droves and shutting down their data center operations. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Uptime Institute’s 2016 Data Center Industry Survey found that 71% of companies maintain assets in enterprise-owned data centers, 20% maintain assets in colocation facilities and just 9% keep assets in the cloud. While there is an increase in the adoption of cloud services year over year, this growth appears to be conservative.
Source: The Uptime Institute
A reason for the conservative approach to cloud adoption is likely that cloud services are not as cheap as they initially appear to be, and a lot of spend is wasted. According to RightScale’s 2017 State of the Cloud Report, survey respondents admitted that 30% of spend in the cloud is wasted. RightScale, a cloud management firm, says the actual number is between 30% and 45%.
If you’re considering a change in your IT infrastructure model that includes cloud services, you should read our analyst white paper, Infrastructure Wars: Colocation Vs Cloud.
To develop this white paper, we interviewed infrastructure experts (outside the colocation industry) that have watched many companies move in and out of the cloud over the years, including Silicon Valley startups that started their infrastructure in the cloud but later decided a hybrid approach was best. They discuss difficulties and outcomes of an all-cloud approach as well as their reasons for choosing the infrastructure models they have chosen for their own companies.
Our white paper also reviews pricing for the most popular AWS services and compares them to average colocation prices. If you’re on the fence, download our free white paper, Infrastructure Wars: Colocation Vs Cloud, to learn about pricing and the thought processes of other experts.
