Comment by throwaway85825

Yeah....

Where folks (often) get lazy is the resulting math over what the real bean-counters care about (but are too lazy to check often).

In a past life, I worked on costing models for a Cable/Fiber contract house, to help the company decide 'what was profitable to keep in house' versus 'what do we subcontract' (sometimes that could even mean we just 'rented' a machine and had a qualified operator using it, based on that employee's hourly rate and expected L2R for taxes... so many spreadsheets...)

And from from my 'I don't know all the factors for this but I've seen how people screw up the big ones' view (and frankly, I'm guessing a lot of us have seen and dealt with the same category of 'bad math' around outsourcing IT work...)

An on-prem data center means:

- You need to account for electricity costs - i.e. CA vs midwest electric rates.

- cooling and power backup capability - Smaller factor but real

- personnel cost - e.x. there's probably cases where a smaller org could be better off with 'on-site' server admins that have other roles based on local wages. Kinda case specfic but it's a case.

- whatever the 'space' holding the stuff costs

  - Sardonic take :Hey, let's have another unused meeting room instead! (e.x. In the case of on-prem shops that simply fled to AWS in their migration from VMware)


 - the cost of licensing whatever is running

  - In defense of this, In one of my earliest IT lives, AWS handling the Oracle licensing for a DB was a *huge* win as far as making it as easy as possible to ensure whatever was going on we couldn't have the Oracle licensing folks 'ding' us on whatever infraction occurred between reviews (that could not be understood by the majority of the company, often including the accused. I was never guilty but I saw it happen to others.)

  - OTOH I know lots of folks who just want to be lazy about what they have to document.

Still, IMO a lot of orgs don't do the right math around these decisions, or just buy into the 'Well trends can change' as though they can decide as an org they need to suddenly triple capacity in a month and it would be able to organically happen in the first place.

Frankly, the orgs that 'might' need that either have their arch set up where they are in cloud, or they are onprem but can scale to cloud if needed in interim.