Is moving data storage from on-prem to public cloud always cost effective?
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Director in Manufacturing2 years ago
Not if you don’t review performance requirements. In my experience if left to engineers and architects without guidance they over provision which is more expensive. I would do the same if I was only accountable for performance It’s critical you tie performance and cost together with the decision process
Initially we let engineers just size environments and they consumed the entire years budget by end of February.
Key is to have mangers involved in provisioning that have both a technical background and understanding of budgeting and costs
CTO in Healthcare and Biotech2 years ago
Things to think about: scale, how much data ingress and egress, accessibility, security, and management. Once you evaluate all of those and cloud offerings to support your data, you should be able to make the call on whether or not it’s cost effective. For example if you have a ton of data ingress and egress, you might not want to store all of your data in S3 because it will be spendy.VP of Engineering in Software2 years ago
It has to be correctly planned and executed. It also depends how much data needs to be moved and the cost of real internal IT.CTO in Software2 years ago
The answer is always it depends.We found that it's very effective for use cases such as:
- Long-term Archival storage. The cost-saving over offsite backup and operational costs are significant. This is especially if you are committing to a long-term pricing model.
- Large-scale analytical data processing. This is close to, if not impossible to do so with an on-premise setup.
Another tip I always keep in mind is that: Storage is cheap; it's actually the compute expense, and labour those are expensive.
Likely you don't need all your data all the time, so it's important to put archival data on a different storage type than daily accessed data. Aside from how often you access the data, it's important how many transactions on the data you perform. If you are copying/moving the data periodically, it's important to have it within the same region for the egress cost.
I've put terabytes of data into a storage account in the cloud and have chosen the cheaper type per GB, only to find that thousands of transactions are done on that data daily. The total monthly cost of all the transactions far exceeded the price per GB, so by switching it to a storage account that is more expensive per GB but cheaper per transaction, the overall cost significantly decreased.
For example, recently, I have reduced our data cost for backups by 85% by moving it from one object storage vendor to another. It's all about what makes sense for what type of data. Don't restrict yourself to using one type of storage or one vendor; explore and do the math on what makes sense for your situation.