 Chapter 3: Diving into Cloud Economics 29 When you’re looking at the right balance of public cloud,  private cloud, and data centers services, you have to take a  step back and look at the overall costs of every environment.  Start by understanding what it costs you to operate your  data center. To do this, look at both direct and indirect costs  related to the application or type of workload you want to  move to the cloud. Some of these indirect costs are hard to  evaluate, making it difficult to accurately predict the actual  costs of running any given application in your company. Here is a fairly comprehensive list of possible costs: ✓ Server costs:  With this and all other hardware components,  you’re specifically interested in the total annual cost of  ownership, which normally consists of the cost of hardware  support plus some amortization cost for the purchase of  the hardware. Additionally, a particular server may be  used to support several different workloads. The more  disparate workloads a server manages, the higher the  support costs. ✓ Storage costs:  What are the management and support  costs for the storage hardware required for the data  associated with this application? Storage costs may be  very high for certain types of applications, such as e-mail  or complex analytics. ✓ Network costs:  When a web application you host internally,  such as e-mail or collaboration, is moved to the cloud,  this may reduce strain on your network. However, it can  substantially increase bandwidth requirements. ✓ Maintaining speed, flexibility, and agility:  By providing  a predictable, heterogeneous application infrastructure,  organizations don’t get bogged down with a different  approach to operations than to developing applications.  Therefore, employees, customers, and suppliers can gain  better access to the services they need. Exploring the Costs These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.