Beware the hidden costs of cloud computing

The headline costs of public cloud may be attractive but there are many other factors to include and without careful planning costs can quickly spiral. The headline costs offered by public cloud providers are increasingly attractive, with each server/instance only a few pounds per month. However, there is much more to running a service than server capacity, and if organisations are not careful their cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control.This doesn’t mean that public cloud is necessarily more expensive – simply that it is vital to understand how the services you are proposing to migrate to are charged for, and prepare a comprehensive business case. Once you have moved services to the cloud and retired your in-house infrastructure, you have to accept what your chosen cloud provider gives you unless you migrate services again.