✓ Disaster recovery costs:  In theory, the cloud service has  its own disaster recovery capabilities, so there may be  a consequential savings on disaster recovery. However,  you need to clearly understand what your cloud provider’s  disaster recovery capability is. For example, does the  cloud service provider have mirrored sites in case of a  power outage at one data center location? IT management  must determine the level of support the cloud provider  will offer. This can be an added cost from the provider,  or you may seek out a secondary vendor to handle disaster recovery and procedures. ✓ Data center infrastructure costs:  A whole series of costs — including electricity, floor space, cooling, and  building maintenance — are an integral part of managing  any data center. Because of the large investment in data  centers, moving workloads to a public cloud may not be financially viable if you’re only utilizing as little as 40 percent of the data center’s compute power. (Of course,  you can deploy a private cloud to take advantage of the  underutilized space and the advantages of the cloud.) ✓ Software maintenance costs:  What’s the annual maintenance cost for the software you may move to a  cloud-based service? The answer can be complicated if  the software license is part of a bundle or if the application  is integrated with other applications. In addition, there’s  the cost of purchasing the software. Is the organization  taking advantage of a “pay-as-you go” licensing model  that allows the user to pay only for what’s used? ✓ Platform costs:  Some applications run only on specific  operating environments — Windows, Linux, HP-UX, IBM z/OS, AIX, and so on. The annual maintenance costs  ✓ Backup and archive costs:  The actual savings on backup  costs depends on what the backup strategy is when the  application moves into the cloud. The same is true of  archiving. First, you have to understand who’s doing the  backup and archiving. Is backup the responsibility of the  IT organization or is it handled by the service provider?  Will all backup be done in the cloud? If so, do you have  a contingency plan if that cloud service is unavailable  when you need that backup? Will your organization still be  required to back up a percentage of critical data locally? Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition  30 These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.