I recently came across an article – 11 ways to boost cloud adoption in government – and thought about another clear benefit of cloud usage.
A real good TCO project is using clouds for infrastructure that processes data for projects that no longer exist and are no longer generating revenue. For example, Amazon allows you to move these programs from your data center to EC2, get them operational, and then shut them down when they’re no longer needed. At this point you have incurred very minimal cost. When conditions arise that require the execution of one of those programs, you spin them up again on EC2.
By using Amazon EC2, you can transform what used to be a fixed cost of allocating a dedicated in-house server—regardless of whether we need the information—to a variable cost that is incurred only when the business case requires it. Now IT departments are able to say, “You’ve got your own developers over in your area. If they want to develop and run this, fine, go ahead. Here are the policies for infrastructure services.”
