Hybrid, on-prem, off-site... here's your chance to give us a cloud economics reality check

Reader Survey You’ve heard the rhetoric that deploying applications to the cloud, rather than running them on-premises, will always cheaper. If you’re an experienced IT pro, though, you’ll know that such generalisations don’t always reflect reality.

Sure, the right workload hosted on the right service can make economic sense, but so too can running applications on the appropriate infrastructure within your own data centre. The problems come when there’s a mismatch between application requirements and platform or service characteristics.

Unsuitable charging schemes and inflexible or punitive contracts can lead to excessive fees paid to cloud providers. Conversely, trying to stretch and twist older on-prem environments to meet many of today’s more dynamic requirements can result in you being stung by legacy licencing models, as well as having to spend time and effort working around technical constraints.

And perhaps most costly of all is cloud and platform sprawl: particularly the uncoordinated accumulation of services that leads to duplication, redundancy, commercial inefficiency and unnecessary complexity that drives up operational overheads.

Against this background, our latest Reg reader survey takes a cold, hard look at the economics of application platforms, from those 10-year-old VMware or Microsoft clusters, to the latest generation of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Do you have thoughts and experiences to share on this? If so, we’d love to hear from you...

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