Saturday, September 25, 2010

How Do Vendors Charge For Cloud Services?

According to cloud computing advice the reports vary on the exact level of demand for cloud computing by businesses and enterprises, it is quite evident that there is a reasonably broad general interest if the features and costs are right and the risks involved are acceptable to the business or individual.

Many organizations find the low cost set up costs for cloud computing a very attractive package. Cloud computing services save you the money which would otherwise be spent upon buying software and applications and also the expenses that go with their implementation and management.

Vendors charge the users for cloud computing services. Different service providers have different rates for different services. Normally, the money is paid on monthly basis. Some however, charge weekly or daily basis.

Most vendors make long term commitments with their customers especially business owners. This is done by offering users discounts and good price packages. You are then required to pre-pay for your cloud computing service in order to get the best of price options. If you pay in advance, you will get some great packages but it would bind you to one particular service provider.

You will indefinitely find yourself stuck with that vendor even if you are dissatisfied with the services you are paying for. However, many vendors now provide guarantees or warranties to the users to ensure service availability and the ongoing existence of the service.

Some service providers now offer cloud services in which you just pay for what you actually use. This means you would be charged for exactly the time you spend for your computing consumption within the cloud and for the space you occupy on a cloud storage system. You do not need to buy packages. You use what you need and you pay the vendors for what you actually are using, as you would for a utility such as electricity.

It is to be noted, that the majority of current cloud computing advice that no single vendor offers specialized service that many users are willing to pay for. Usually vendors provide the same services for all their users and they charge them for whatever service they use accordingly. No enterprise or organization so far has been successful in buying specialized services from vendors. This is also a reason why so few large enterprises have not not made the shift to the public cloud. They make their own clouds, often referred to as private clouds if they need specialized services.

Amazon is at present the lowest cost cloud computing option overall especially for production applications that require more than 6.5 hours of CPU per day. The current pricing advantage of Amazon is utterly due to its reserved instances model. Also, it is the service provider with the most experience right now and this makes it the one to beat with low prices and maturity. For their S3 service, there is even no minimum fee required. The Amazon vendors charge you only for what you use.

On the other hand, Microsoft offers their pay-as-you-go Windows based Azure cloud computing service. Microsoft also offers companies the option to pay per use "consumption" pricing plan or a "commitment" option whereby, the companies can get discounts for a six month commitment. Microsoft also provide special calculators to help potential customers estimate their costs and compare programs with other services and vendors. Microsoft declares that it will make a healthy return on the new cloud services since the company will acquire higher percentage of IT spending on larger targeted accounts.

Read more..

No comments:

Post a Comment