Performance Advantages Contrary to popular belief, companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google don’t have access to superior hardware. Their services rely on the same enterprise-grade hardware that Alternative Cloud providers use, with raw performance being generally equal. However, Big Cloud can employ several dubious strategies to increase their margins at the expense of performance: • Extended service life: Big Cloud often extends the service life of its hardware beyond its optimal lifespan, meaning that a customer may unknowingly end up on a platform that is several generations old. • Higher consolidation ratios: Big Cloud is fond of forcing more customers to contend for fewer resources – such as RAM, CPU, disk and network resources – which can hurt performance during periods of high usage. • Performance throttling: To counter the effects of older hardware and higher consolidation ratios (the number of virtual servers that can run on each physical host machine), Big Cloud can employ aggressive throttling strategies, which prevent customer systems from performing at full potential. Good Alternative Cloud providers avoid strategies such as this. C3 Complete, for instance, offers currentgeneration hardware, conservative consolidation ratios and performance throttling only as a last resort – never as a tool to enhance margins. In other words, there is no inherent performance benefit when working with Big Cloud, and in many cases, you could end up with a performance deficit. Price and Cost Containment Imagine that a local self-storage company charges you $200 a month for a unit. They boast that another company down the street charges $300 a month – “Just think of the savings,” they’d say. But after reading the fine print – or worse, when receiving your first monthly invoice – you realize you’re only allowed one monthly visit, and every subsequent visit cost you $50. Your $200-a-month unit has become an $800-a-month unit. Over and over again, this is what we see with Big Cloud. Too many organizations sign up with a Big Cloud provider, build their environment and move in their data and applications, only to discover that the provider ’s baseline services don’t meet their needs, triggering additional fees. And boy, does Big Cloud love fees: ingress fees, egress fees, high-usage fees, high-utilization penalties, and more. Before long, many customers find that they pay twice as much or more than originally budgeted. One Big Cloud provider ’s egress fees even earned them the name “Cloud California”: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. So, while Big Cloud costs may initially appear lower, unexpected fees can rack up fast. The result? Budgetbreaking bills you didn’t anticipate, don’t understand and can’t comfortably explain to your CFO. Alternative Cloud typically works differently. At C3, we determine your monthly cost based on your actual business needs — determined by actual conversations between our engineers and your team — and then allow you to utilize your cloud environment to its fullest. There is no metering of data transfer, CPU time, disk I/O or other metrics. It’s your platform to use, without limitation and without fear of unexpected fees. In short, there is no fine print here. Your CFO will love the budget-friendly cost containment of a flat monthly fee, and your CIO/CTO will enjoy the unencumbered performance, reliability, security and flexibility. Ease of Use Advantages Over time, Big Cloud has evolved into a collection of absurdly complex platforms. Consider that Amazon Web Services alone offers no less than 11 certification programs that teach engineers how to deploy and manage their services. Not to be outdone, VIRTUAL REALITIES What public cloud providers does your organization use? Source: Flexera, 2023 Azure AWS Google Cloud Platform Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IBM Cloud Alibaba Cloud Other 41% 30% 13% 6% 47% 27% 10% 4% 17% 26% 19% 9% 8% 18% 16% 12% 5% 8% 5% 4% 5% 11% 10% 8% 12% 16% 9% Running significant workloads Running some workloads Experimenting Plan to use Which factors are having an impact on ri ing p emiums? Sour e: Panaseer, 2022 Increasing sophistication of cyber threat actors Increasing cost of ransomeware attacks (e.g. higher ransoms) Inability to accurately understand a customer’s security posture What are the most important factors when assessing security posture? Little Lit Lit Somewhat of an impact 36% Somewhat of an impact 42% Somewhat of an impact 39% Significant impact 38% Significant impact 36% Significant i pact 35% How do insurers assess cyber risk? 40% 22 CHANNELV ISION | MARCH - APRIL 2023
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