Cloud has undoubtedly become an imperative propeller of innovation and technological advancements in every sector for business – big or small. Along with supporting innovation, it has helped organisations ensure the most important aspect which is business resilience by creating a safe and fortified space for their most mission critical applications and data.
With its many critical benefits, cloud has made itself an omnipresent business enabler and supporting this is IDC’s report which found that the Indian public cloud services market, including IaaS, PaaS & SaaS, revenue totalled $4.6 Billion for 2021. However, even though cloud has become a business imperative and is predicted to sky rocket, some organizations still witness challenges in their cloud acceptance route primarily due to lack of understanding making these organizations hesitant and therefore avoiding or delaying their organizational digital transformation.
In my conversations with many such CIOs and business leaders, the most significant concern that they showcase is towards spending ‘an unplanned hefty amount’ for their cloud journey due to unexpected fees. Even the most experienced businesses get surprised by these hidden costs or egress costs which creep up in arears and ultimately leaves a lengthy bill to be paid. This is also supported by a research by O’Reilly which found that the biggest concern amongst organizations leveraging cloud is managing cost. Egress costs also has another layer of concern which is in its process of getting billed in arears. Due to this, enterprises are often unable to plan smart extraction of data in advance and ultimately makes them unable to stick to their cloud budgets.
Some of the businesses have also shared with me that even when they master the art of predicting the costs, they witness another challenge which is a cost structure that is nearly impossible to understand. Through all this, I have learnt that businesses want to leverage cloud but in a cost effective way and certainly don’t want to get caught in the whirlwind of egress costs. How then do we ensure that cloud providers are able to deliver this and move towards a cloud-first world effectively? Well, it certainly becomes the duty of a cloud provider to allow the businesses to experience cloud economics in its true sense. Businesses should also move towards providers whose services go beyond just selling the product.
For an example at Oracle, we ensure that we are always customer first and therefore offer superior cloud economics for our customers. This reflects in our egress costs which are as low as zero for the first 10 TB in a month and after that we offer discounted per GB charge for upto 100 TB starting at $0.0085 (depending upon the location). Our customer, one of the leading video meetings services saved 80% in network egress costs. We also offer Oracle FastConnect connecting customers to their OCI virtual cloud network directly via dedicated, private, high-bandwidth connections. As multi-cloud environments become important, we offer partnerships with other cloud providers in a way that helps to reduce egress costs.
Ultimately, cloud’s importance today cannot be questioned and therefore organisations must become smart in their cloud choices to gain maximum benefits.