Beware of cloud egress charges

The webcast Sticker Shock: Breaking down the real costs of cloud egress charges (sponsored by KeepItSafe which offers comprehensive cloud data availability solutions) makes a case against public cloud egress charges to support its products

Highlights & arguments from that webcast & accompanying notes -

Cloud data egress describes the movement of data originating within a cloud network and transferring to another geography, external cloud, or back to an on-premises environment.

Ingress is usually free, and customers understand that they are buying the usage of a cloud providers’ infrastructure plus its data storage capabilities, data protection, and management functions. What is commonly overlooked are transactional fees and even more significant, egress fees.
..when customers egress 30TB of data from their cloud provider on a monthly basis, by the end of the year, they’ve spent at least $30K —to simply access their own data.

The Best Decision is One You Can Always Change - Have you thought of a cloud retractability plan for when you want to get data out of the cloud? Much like disaster recovery, having a cloud retractability plans or cloud exit strategy enables enterprises to plan for contingencies and give themselves options if the cloud isn’t the right solution.

Why Data Egress May be Necessary
A cloud provider is experiencing financial or management problems
• A provider has security issues
• There is a less expensive storage option available
• You have a mandate to bring your data in-house
• Retiring an application
• General dissatisfaction with a provider (support issues, performance issues, billing issues, etc.)

Questions to think about
• Once you are “in the cloud” how hard is it to get out?
- Logistics
- Data Egress Fees
• How do you download that much data?
• Will data backups be treated similarly to data egress?
• Where will you store that data?
• What format will the data be in when you download it (how easy will it be to attach the data to an application)?
• What about application down time?

Best Practices
• Research billing practices before storing data in the cloud. The primary reason for continued public cloud waste is the unnerving complexity of cloud pricing and billing  promise of low costs drives the initial decision to move to the cloud.
• Choose the most appropriate cloud storage type for your data (general purpose, archive, high performance, etc.)
• Use granular billing alerts
• Audit your storage use, and keep track of data growth
• Use deduplication or other data reduction techniques before performing a data egress
• Practice data lifecycle management techniques
• Be aware of how storage is being used, and clean up anything you don’t need (dev / test buckets, old VMs, other clutter)

PERILS OF DIY PUBLIC CLOUD BACKUP
• No Clear Path Forward
– General-purpose public cloud = complexity
– Meeting specific governance and compliance
• Every Mistake is Magnified
– Am I a public cloud expert?
– Do I have the right plan and strategy in place?
• Hidden Costs Everywhere
– Compound data growth pricing
– Network egress charges
– Data access fees

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