Episode Summary

iland Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Emily Omier, Matt Leib, and Marc Beder for a conversation around the concerns customers have with finding a return on investment in the cloud. They discuss how to calculate ROI in the cloud, if the cloud offers a definitively positive or negative ROI, and those cloud costs that frequently get overlooked. Don’t just move to the cloud because it’s the cool thing to do. Make sure it’s the right thing to do — your wallet will thank us.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[03:19] Customers should be concerned about ROI with any purchase they make, but cloud introduces a lot of new ways to calculate value. What advice do you have for how ROI in the cloud should be calculated?

Topic 2

[10:54] Have you seen cases where moving to the cloud is a clear cut good or bad return on investment?

Topic 3

[17:17] Different cloud vendors can have wildly different cost and pricing models. What are some costs that customers commonly don’t consider when moving to the cloud?

Cloud Bites

[01:32] “The really big thing is that every end user has slightly different needs and different goals, and exactly what they need to be looking at in terms of ROI is going to be a little bit different, but you need to be able to talk to the customer and understand what’s important to them.” — Emily Omier 

[04:45] “Fundamentally, a lot of companies are doing TCO analyses against moving to cloud as opposed to an ROI because of all the enablers of cloud could afford them.” — Marc Beder 

[06:21] “The cloud, migrating onto it, migrating off of it, because of egress charges, bandwidth charges, etc, can be a very malleable number, and it’s really quite difficult to turn that into an ROI without some really advanced math.” — Matt Leib 

[07:15] “It clearly has value for the company, and boiling cloud down to a cost play, I think, is a vast oversimplification.” — Emily Omier 

[07:39] “There is a learning curve in training whoever is managing it to do it on a different architecture. So that needs to be taken into account as well.” — Matt Leib

[08:49] “There’s definitely a lack of consideration for opportunity cost. Well, how much could we have done if we had this, as opposed to just focusing on the status quo?” — Marc Beder 

[13:08] “Are we trying to adopt this technology because it’s right for us and it’s going to meet one of our strategic goals? Or are we doing this because we read about how awesome it is, or we saw a great talk at KubeCon or something?” — Emily Omier

[13:34] “Certainly the industry thinks the cloud is the next big thing, but it’s not always the right thing, and unless you do your evaluation, you’re bound to find yourself with surprises.” — Matt Leib

[15:30] “It’s really, really important to understand that you might be missing out on ancillary services by just moving an application to a cloud provider that you haven’t fully evaluated.” — Matt Leib

[18:33] “They’ll just find what, at face value, appears to be the equivalent of that workload in that target platform. But what often gets missed out are things like, well, how am I going to connect to this?” — Marc Beder

[19:25] “What’s not widely understood is that when you go a layer deeper than that is that there’s other limits that are imposed on different instance types.” — Marc Beder

[20:20] “Some people tend to think that the cloud providers have, like, totally commodity services and that they’re completely interchangeable and they’re the same and that the only thing that’s different about that might be price. And that’s inaccurate.” — Emily Omier