Cloud Calculus, Part II

We received a lot of interest yesterday in the ‘Cloud Calculus’ post, and I’d like to follow up with a couple more thoughts.

Our IT Infrastructure Director made a good point after reading the post that there is an inflection point where SaaS starts to makes sense, at least for us and potentially others.  An inflection point is described as “If one imagines driving a vehicle along a winding road, inflection is the point at which the steering-wheel is momentarily "straight" when being turned from left to right or vice versa.”

The example he used is our 2^nd level spam filtering.  We had an on premise box that got pounded with 20k emails daily after it had gone through a first level filter that pulls out over 100k emails.  The cost in terms of time of maintaining that box was substantial, and something that often failed.

When we moved to a SaaS solution, we were able to get a huge increase in performance and stability, and decreased our management by 90%.  That, for us, was an easy decision, and is exactly the kind of savings to look for when choosing how to implement technology.

Here at CompTIA, we have what I think is a good balance right now.  Parts of our CRM, for example, run in the public cloud.  We also have a private cloud where we have a number of virtual servers provisioned that run several of our websites. 

However, we also run a significant number of virtual machines within our data center and have seen big gains in productivity, especially in our development environment and backup strategy.  With cheap attached storage and high bandwidth to an offsite facility, our inflection point is lower than choosing to go with a managed service for some of our processes.

The caveat to everything I said above and yesterday is “right now.”  It’s tough to keep up with the myriad options available, and the costs for both SaaS and local solutions are shifting.  Thankfully, each software and SaaS bill keeps the analysis at the front of my mind, and forces us to get better.

Please comment and let me know what kind of analysis works for you!