The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Availability, climate control, equipment, equipment floor space, fault tolerance, fire suppression systems, location and power and backup power. These are just a short list of what you’re looking at if you want to stand up and operate your own data center facilities. 

Costs for all of the above run the gamut based on location and specific requirements, of course. But Apropos estimates the costs associated with the additional square footage necessary to maintain an on-site IT presence most typically fall into the $1,200 per square foot range (much more in areas like San Francisco), with a 42U rack consuming about 8 square feet of floor space. Meanwhile, it says, the cost per kilowatt of redundant UPS capacity for IT will run you about $11,500 in a Tier I environment, $12,500 in a Tier II environment, $23,000 in a Tier III environment and $25,000 in a Tier IV environment.

The point is, creating or expanding a data center isn’t going to be cheap, and it certainly will not be a small task.

That’s why so many businesses are now opting instead to leverage cloud technology. The cloud, as you may know, allows for shared but secure resources in multi-party environments. With the cloud, everybody wins, given the decreased strain on users’ IT departments; just-in-time scalability; and, according to some sources, the lower costs.

But, as Tom Gillis wrote in this piece for Forbes last year around this time, the argument for moving to the cloud is less about actual cost savings and more about the ability to quickly and easily spin up the necessary resources to support new services.

“The business needs agility – the freedom to deploy new services as soon as they are ready,” said Gillis, a former line of business general manager at Cisco (News - Alert), “and not be bogged down in forecasts that are almost certainly wrong.”