This video looks at the benefits of data center vs cloud, comparing both from a capital expense (CapEx) and operational expense (OpEx) perspective.
As many companies are discovering, the drive to lower costs. Removing the need for data center hosting, rack space, power and cooling together with disaster recovery (DR) sites which are underutilised and not used until a disaster, is really only the first step on the cloud journey.
The cloud opens up all sorts of possibilities for innovation, which makes not only IT better, but provides direct benefit to the business, driving value, profit and growth.
This can be useful for a non technical audience to explain the benefits of moving to the cloud from a datacentre (on premise) environment from a consumption, time and financial point of view.
The video below shows data center vs cloud comparison table.
| Datacenter (CapEx) | Cloud (Opex) |
| Purchase computing equipment (capital expense). For example, servers, networking, storage, data center hosting, rack space, power and cooling together with disaster recovery (DR) sites which are underutilised and not used until a disaster | Pay for what you use, similar to a telecom provider (operational expense) |
| One time purchase followed by several years of depreciation | Pay as you go on demand. If demand decreases turn off or remove systems (no charge) |
| Purchase x3 or x4 hardware to insure apps meet peak usage | Optimize use of cloud on day-to-day basis, adjusting consumption and utilization to achieve their cost goals |
| IT could easily spend 80% budget leaving small amount for innovation | Only provision what you require at the time of requirement, saving costs |
| Max utilization must be planned for and provisioned, financially inefficient | Can scale up or out resources instantly |
| Taking a very long time to provision new resources. Time is money | Instant provisioning on demand, lead times shorten increasing profits |
| Letting your equipment dictate your business approach, rather than your business needs driving your IT infrastructure | Flexible, adaptable and scalable cloud services to meet ever changing and new requirements |
| Sacrifice agility when investing time, money, and manpower into a capital expense | Cloud services are very agile. Can automate, add, remove or change resources instantly |
| Paying staff to “keep the lights on” when they could be contributing to better products and processes. Either you’re taking staff from what they were originally hired to do or paying additional staff. Either way, profits are at risk | Frees the mundane tasks of system backup, network maintenance, patches, and software upgrades. Increasing employee productivity |
