The journos over at ZDNet recently published an article which gives form to a creeping malaise that has beset companies of all sizes, as they continue to move more services to the cloud: sticker shock. Specifically, organizations are feeling the bite in two primary ways: painful usage fees for metered services, and stealth deployments that go largely unnoticed… until the bill arrives, that is.

Cloud services providers can create artificially low entry points of their services by charging for just about everything – disk space usage, disk I/Os, network data transfer, cpu cycles and more – via a per-usage billing model. This creates a seductive environment in which cloud services can be initially deployed for what seems like very affordable costs, but as usage ramps up, the resulting painful bills lead to what the article characterizes as “giving CFOs sticker shock on a month-by-month basis”, adding that they find themselves “gasping at the unexpected expenses seen in their monthly bills.”

Secondarily, the preponderance of open-ended cloud resource plans has allows a creeping lava flow of usage that only seems to go one way. As stated in the article, “Spinning up that AWS or Azure instance at the snap of a finger may be a beautiful thing to behold, but sometimes the application, testbed or whatever it may be gets abandoned and forgotten — but still appears on monthly bills, along with all the other spun-up but not powered-down services.”

At Datacate, we recognize that our clients have worked hard for their money. Rather than creating an environment that promotes run-away spending, we’ve crafted our cloud services portal to enable our clients to control their expenses. With Datacate’s cloud services, all resources are priced and charged using a flat-rate model that includes usage, with no metered charges for utilization. This means that all costs are known up-front when deploying cloud resources via our portal. Additionally, the scope of resources made available to a client’s cloud deployment is controlled by the client, not by demand. While clients have the ability to increase (and decrease) resources provisioned to their cloud, it is done explicitly by the client as a discrete upgrade or downgrade to their cloud. This allows our clients to control usage creep and manage their resources in a controlled way.

According to the ZDNet report, 37 percent of organizations that are using cloud resources listed unpredictable costs as a top issue. Don’t join that group – use Datacate’s cloud services and take control of your cloud expenses.

Interested in learning more? Contact us today for a consultation or a live demonstration of the system.