Total Cost of Ownership an Urgent Priority for Cloud-Ready Finance and IT Analytics Leaders
Measurement and accountability for technology costs isn’t just an IT issue
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) refers to the total cost of acquiring, operating, and maintaining an IT solution or infrastructure over its entire lifecycle. It includes direct costs such as licensing, hardware, and personnel costs, as well as indirect costs such as training, maintenance, and support.
For IT leaders, understanding the TCO of a solution is critical for resource allocation and decision-making. By calculating the TCO, IT leaders can evaluate the true cost and value of the solution, as well as compare different technology options and vendors to make informed decisions that align with both business goals and budget constraints.
From the finance team’s perspective, awareness of TCO drives better decisions about budgeting and alignment, and ensures that the organization gets the most from its technology investments and can manage its projected lifetime costs of an application accurately from inception through to delivery.
The reality of data & analytics in the cloud: did your snowflake just become a blizzard?
Never has the measurement of TCO been more critical than in cloud-based data and analytics platforms, where storage and compute costs are often billed separately and charged using opaque models filled with different tierings, surcharges and add-ons.
For customers considering a migration of on-premises applications or analytics processing to the cloud, such proposals are often fronted with the promise of ‘seamless integration’ with other services, interconnectivity with aligned technologies in a wider ecosystem, or a simple reduction in capital expenditure for on-premises based resources, such as servers or data storage.
Cloud services are often purchased in bulk, discounted for storage (to ensure that a customer’s data gravity shifts from on-premises to cloud and makes the service ever-more ‘sticky’) and are then driven by a cloud service provider’s desire to sell increasing numbers of so-called “compute units” to generate value from that data, whether that’s from the core Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application or from layers of additional technology that are required to offer complete solutions. Each new layer incurring further operational expense through the licenses, expertise and resources needed to manage and deliver this functionality.
There’s an expectation that cloud customers can simply switch on or off their services, queries or environments when they’re not required, in order to save costs, but in reality this flexibility doesn’t translate to financial control. Customers can find themselves with nasty shocks arriving in the form of monthly invoices as those compute units translate into thousands or even millions of dollars of operational expense, often extremely difficult to tie back to teams, individuals or even initiatives.
The rise of cloud platforms for data and analytics teams has brought many benefits to organizations, especially around enabling teams to move their projects forward with agility, but it has also created challenges, particularly around cost control and governance. With the lack of visibility into cloud usage and costs, many organizations are facing spiraling expenses and a lack of control over consumption. As a result, businesses are urgently reviewing their cloud data analytics strategies to help manage their SaaS expenses and create a more cost-efficient environment.
Without proper governance and cost controls, businesses are risking unnecessary expenses and wasted resources. In fact, research from Gartner shows that a quarter of SaaS software is underutilized or overdeployed, leading to significant waste.
Link: https://www.gartner.com/document/4006574?ref=solrResearch&refval=357845593
Fixed consumption model solutions offer an alternative to the current ‘free for all’ consumption approach for cloud-based data platforms.
CFOs and IT leaders need to take a hybrid approach that balances the flexibility of compute units with the benefits of stronger cost controls and predictable expenditure to manage and lower the overall TCO while retaining seamless integration and open data delivery.
Why Incorta for cost-effective low-TCO analytics?
Incorta’s open data delivery platform can be perceived as a major benefit to technology and finance leaders looking for cost-effective analytics without spiraling cloud bills because it provides predictable pricing and eliminates the risk of overpaying for unused cloud resources.
With Incorta’s innovative Proof of Value program, organizations can determine upfront the costs for high-performance analytics solutions based only on the data and analytics they actually need, avoiding unnecessary charges associated with traditional cloud-based data warehousing solutions.
Additionally, Incorta’s fixed consumption model enables organizations to scale their analytics as needed, without worrying about unexpected costs or capacity constraints. This allows businesses to focus on driving value from their data, rather than worrying about infrastructure costs or complex pricing models.
Many organizations choose Incorta to help modernize their legacy analytics environments, replacing last-generation tools with new capabilities and wider data delivery and integration potential. However, customers also see Incorta as a complementary platform to their existing architecture, offering high-performance analytics against complex business application data without the need for computationally (or financially expensive) data transformation pipelines while working seamlessly with current cloud or on-premises data platforms.
Overall, Incorta’s fixed consumption model provides a transparent and predictable pricing structure that helps organizations avoid unexpected cloud costs, while also providing the scalability and flexibility needed to meet changing business needs without requiring significant disruption to their current technology stack. This can be a major benefit to IT and finance leaders who are looking for cost-effective analytics solutions that can support their business growth and drive value from their data.
To learn more about Incorta’s open data delivery platform with transparent pricing for scalable data analytics, visit incorta.com.