‘Most people go into the cloud looking for lower costs but if you want to find these you need to appreciate the new IT challenges you will face,’ said Dave Zabrowski, founder and CEO of Cloud Cruiser, particularly if your cloud initiatives are being managed by non-IT executives.
‘You can’t just launch a virtual machine and then forget about it,’ he cautioned, or you could end up with an unnecessarily large bill at the end of the month, whether it’s running in the public cloud or on an internal private cloud. He also warned of the dangers of rogue applications. ‘If an in-house app starts consuming huge amounts of processing power it’s a load balancing issue,’ he said, but in the public cloud it’s a cost issue, and if you want to staying within budget you need to be in control.
Cost control tools such as Cloud Cruiser can be used to collect information on what IT workloads are costing, and where and who is consuming these resources (at a corporate, business unit, departmental, or more granular level), so that the data can be used (by IT or finance, for example) to make cost optimisation decisions. ‘Think of it a dashboard for the cloud,’ said Zabrowski, though Cloud Cruiser can be used to view and manage public, private hosted and hybrid clouds, and more traditional IT resources.
