Many agencies are moving their data from their own systems to the cloud. A major reason is the greater flexibility of storage and processing power available from cloud computing. Businesses using the cloud do not have to pay any upfront infrastructure costs and only pay for what they use. Other advantages of cloud computing solutions include increased capacity and scalability, reduced maintenance, and greater data security.
Cost is often cited as a reason for using cloud computing for data storage, but unless the parameters of usage are understood and managed properly, agencies can find that their budgets are exceeded. They then face a choice of going back to on-premise systems or accepting the higher costs of cloud storage. There is, however, another option of using a Data Integration Hub (DIH) that runs in the cloud and is easier and less costly to operate.
Agencies tend to use cloud data services to store data from their operational systems in a format that users can access the data more easily.
Managing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a cloud computing service involves understanding the costs of hosting, integrating, running, securing, and managing workloads in the cloud. There are also costs associated with the underlying infrastructure, such as compute, data transfer and storage. The cost of a cloud engineer should also be part of the cloud TCO.
For AWS, aggregated data transfer across all services is charged at a specified cost per gigabyte. There will also be charges per hour for compute resources which start from when a resource starts until it ends. For data stored, there is a charge for each gigabyte used.
Some of the common mistakes cloud computing customers make that can increase the TCO are:
Agencies that put their data into one of the major cloud computing services frequently have large volumes of data stored. This creates its own challenges.
In addition, an agency will still need to invest in software to extract data from their AMS and transform data for other requirements, adding to the overall technology cost.
When using a cloud computing service, agencies need to budget how much data should be stored and for how long. For some customer-centric data, the cloud may be the right place, but storing all business data there can be costly.
When it comes to using cloud computing, there is a cost-benefit calculation that needs to be considered. Agency IT leaders need to determine how much data should be stored in the cloud, and for how long? For relevant, pertinent, customer-centric data, cloud storage may be the right place for the data. However, Agencies that choose to store all their business data in cloud computing services like AWS or Microsoft Azure, may often find this to be a costly decision.
Instead, some operational data can be more cost-effectively stored outside of the agency's cloud computing service data store. Offloading data to an external database can significantly reduce data storage and therefore reduce costs. Synatic’s DIH has a built-in data warehouse that can be used to cut down cloud computing service costs as well as the cost that it takes to move data between systems. Synatic’s data warehousing abilities combined with its powerful functionality to extract and verify data from many different sources, makes it the perfect tool to use in tandem with your AWS or Microsoft Azure cloud storage. Other advantages of using the Synatic DIH are that security and governance can all be managed in one environment which does not require a multitude of separate skills to use.
Using Synatic independently or together with a cloud computing vendor’s data store delivers several benefits to agencies wanting to store their data in the cloud.
To find out how you can maximize the potential of your cloud computing services and reduce your cloud data costs, contact Synatic today.
