5. Thinking about cost the traditional way
When we help customers create cloud business cases and look at how they are comparing cloud and on-premises workloads, we often see that they lack the FinOps expertise to manage a more sophisticated cost and procurement scenario in a multicloud world. Systems Integrators, Cloud Architects are rarely software or licensing experts. They are not focused on the pricing dynamics of the IT world.
For example, if you want to buy a database license or another specific software product, you have the option to purchase directly on cloud marketplaces but also through traditional software contracts with hybrid, on-premise and cloud rights. If you build your business case assuming that the software will be procured in the cloud as a SaaS solution (which may seem reasonable for an architect to assume), it’s simply the wrong way to build the cost estimate. In fact, we’ve seen many situations where the business case does not work in the cloud because the software costs are overestimated or not optimised. We also see this with cloud infrastructure, where long-term contracts often improve unit costs.