To mitigate this concern, public Cloud vendors provide service levels for all their products with financial credits provided if they are not achieved. The robust engineering of the Cloud environment is such that high availability is consistently achieved. In a worst-case scenario, organizations can further protect critical applications by configuring them to automatically failover to alternate data centres should a Cloud data centre go offline.
There is a general perception that services in the Cloud are more expensive than in the non-Cloud environment. This is often raised when the comparison between Cloud and non-Cloud platforms does not accurately reflect all the costs that make up the non-Cloud infrastructure. With all the non-Cloud costs in the table above considered, there’s an almost 50% reduction in support and maintenance costs when the Cloud is chosen. When doing a financial comparison or Cloud ROI, it’s also important to take into account the increased revenue that will take place as you drive your digital transformation results using Cloud services.