There is a significant change in Cost Management when you move from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. In the cloud, costs can be visualized in real time, and capacity can be quickly scaled in line with your actual needs
With cloud, your resource consumption is visualized in a dashboard, so you always have a live picture of your costs. This offers far better opportunities for making decisions on scaling and prioritization on an informed and transparent basis. Cloud also offers a completely different kind of flexibility because capacity can be adapted to real needs rather than relying on estimates of expected needs. This allows you to avoid over-designed solutions and, in high pressure situations such as peak time periods, you can automatically increase the amount of resources you need in a matter of minutes.
From CAPEX to OPEX
In addition to the improved overview and flexible price structure, cloud also has the advantage of handling IT costs differently in your accounts. With Cloud, money is no longer spent on physical servers and other hardware, which is booked as a capital investment (CAPEX) and depreciated over several years. Instead, costs can now be associated with the consumption of individual services and registered as an operating expense (OPEX). This means that costs move more and more from the IT department to the business, where end users often deliver the necessary budget themselves. Cloud also allows for the "tagging" of individual resources, which gives a detailed insight into how consumption and costs are distributed between the various projects and services.
Hot or cold storage
There is also a great deal to be saved by critically assessing what is "hot data" and what is "cold data". Cold data, which takes a little longer to download, could for example be archived data from previous projects, accounting information and other types of data that you only access rarely. This data can be stored at a fraction of the cost compared to more business-critical hot data that needs to be available at a latency of a few milliseconds. There are several tools, such as Azure Advisor, that can help you make the necessary assessments.
