Moving your server to the cloud will save tonnes of money...right?

You have an ageing server, and your IT guy has told you it’s time to replace it. Argh, that sounds expensive! Maybe now’s a good time to move to the cloud - that’d be the cheaper option, surely?

Actually, on its own, it’s not likely to save you a whole lot of dosh (sorry to be the bearer of bad news).

One of my favourite sayings is, “The cloud is just a computer in someone else’s house”. The infrastructure you’re renting still has costs: it needs to be powered, cooled (one of the major costs of any data centre), kept secure, patched and maintained, and refreshed when it gets older. The company running this data centre also needs to make a buck, so what you’re paying is for your share of that hardware, spread over its useful lifetime.