Essential Steps to Get the Most Out of Your Cloud Investment

A Day in the Life of an IT Manager

In order to understand the costs of on-premises infrastructures, it’s useful to consider a day in the life of an IT Manager. IT Managers will typically need to maintain control over three cost bases on a day-to-day basis:

• IT operational costs. These are the basic day-to-day costs of maintaining an on-premises infrastructure.
• Day-to-day maintenance. Onsite equipment requires constant upkeep to ensure it runs optimally and does not run into issues that cause downtime.
• Skills debt. Skills debt may be slightly less tangible, but it is not less important. Skills debt refers to the need for an IT Manager and their team to constantly upskill in order to support the evolving technologies their organisation operates.

All three of these cost bases can often be hidden when organisations consider the recurring cost of maintaining an on-premises data centre. They shouldn’t be. Before you incur them, though, there are also the costs of setting up an onsite data centre. These are extensive, and invariably include physical servers, storage devices, switching, cabling, cooling, backup power units and and fire safety equipment and physical security, recurring costs for power consumption, internet connectivity, equipment servicing and more. Not to mention the environmental impact of owning you own data centre.

It’s a lot to consider, and so is the day-to-day maintenance of these items. This includes – but is not limited to – resource management, license management, server clean-ups, keeping switches up-to-date, keeping patching up-to-date, VPNs connecting correctly, ensuring the internal network is built and managed properly, keeping applications up-to-date, managing Active Directory and managing email. And that’s before you’ve even got to day-to-day break fix requirements.

When you combine all of these factors, the true cost of on-premises data centres begins to come to light. But there are some hidden costs that you should consider, too.

The Hidden Costs of On-Premises Data Centres

The typical physical server lifespan is three to five years. When you purchase a physical server, you tend to go bigger than you need in order to prepare for expansion. However, these large, expensive servers can soon become outdated, and they may cease to support applications and networking – introducing risk.

It’s also worth touching again on skills debt, as it’s super important. Everyone has an application that fixes a problem, but you can’t know everything when you have a small team with a broad scope of responsibility. This is a massive issue, and it can be a massive cost. Outsourcing skills is normally cheaper than employing these skills in-house, as providers like Six Degrees will spread costs across our client base so we can employ the best of the best.

At the end of the day though, there are a lot of small items that may not be considered when comparing the cost for your on-premises data centres to cloud computing. These are still a cost though. You may be thinking that colocating is easier, as you’ll mainly manage your own hardware while your colocation company manages the rest. There is truth in this. However, this costs money too – typically at a monthly rate – and what you pay will depend on the tier of the data centre you use, not to mention the cost behind traveling to and from the data centre and the time it takes to travel.