Many businesses are tempted to go down the public cloud route when they see the low prices on offer. However, many of these solutions have complex hidden costs that contribute to a much larger bill than customers expect. Considering the fact that 95% of business and IT leaders believe the most confusing part of public cloud adoption is how billing is managed, it’s important to understand how your business could be impacted by sneaky fees.
An example of these expenses that people fail to fully understand are ingress and egress costs. With significant dues arising when shifting data out of your cloud or to another cloud region, be sure to dive into the nitty-gritty details of your agreement before deciding whether a public cloud solution makes sense for your organisation.
While having a public cloud system that supplements your in-house solution can have a big benefit, being aware of all the factors at play ensures you establish the best foundation for your business. Here, we take a look at ingress and egress costs and explore how your business might be negatively impacted.
Ingress Costs Explained
Ingress costs are far more straightforward than their counterpart. These are simply the types of fees involved when uploading your data to the service, whether that’s at the storage or network level. In fact, most public cloud providers offer this service for free, tempting many businesses to rush into their decision without considering egress costs. The real challenge begins when you start having to move your data outside or between different clouds.
Understand Egress Costs
When companies have to retrieve their data from the public cloud, this is when they’re bound to be hit with egress costs. While these costs might appear insignificant on the surface, the fees can build up rapidly if you’re a data-centric company that has extensive outgoing transfers. With public cloud costs typically charged by the gigabyte upon transferring your data out of the system, there are several ways to incur these fees.
For instance, outbound network traffic and cross-region traffic is a common way that organisations get stung by egress fees. In particular, websites offering streaming must pay close attention, while data replication within the public cloud may also prove costly. Meanwhile, the widespread use of video conferencing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has also caused many organisations cause for concern.
Depending on the nature of your business and its public cloud requirements, egress costs might not be a major issue. But it’s vital that your organisation is fully aware of the fees involved to avert a potentially costly bill in the future that could be difficult to rectify.
Keeping Tabs on Your Costs
If your company is ready to sign a public cloud contract, don’t make any hasty decisions. Instead, be sure to understand the fine print of the agreement to appreciate whether a service provider makes financial sense for your storage and accessibility requirements.
To do so, you should consider how everyone in your team has to operate. Do you have staff that work from home or an international customer base? These considerations might influence the final cost of your public cloud bill.
With a wide range of cloud service expense management (CSEM) tools helping organisations stay on top of their spending, this can be a handy way to monitor your cloud usage and discover where your egress charges are being accumulated.
Speak to the cloud experts
Choosing the ideal cloud hosting solution for your business can be hugely complicated. However, the friendly team at 5G Networks is on-hand to help you find a system that makes for your needs – get in touch to learn more. With our 5GN Cloud combining private cloud, public cloud and national data centres, we offer our customers a remarkably detailed cloud management system.
