The Hidden Costs of DIY Cloud Management

The reality of operating a business in the 21st century is that the vast majority of it, necessarily, lives on the internet. Whether it’s collaboration between remote-working, international teams of staff, the sale of goods and services via ecommerce or simply the handling of impossibly large amounts of data, the internet is a non-negotiable part – and even an outsized aspect – of running your business.

Data is the important word here, too, particularly for the fact that it all needs to ‘go’ somewhere. Data storage at its most basic is a costly endeavour – and the vast amounts of data your business requires, runs through and generates on a daily basis is far more than can be stored in a rack of SSDs. This is why the cloud is such a vital part of modern business-making, and such an outsized cost of its own for so many businesses that don’t have the requisite knowledge. Here, we’ll explore the hidden costs of DIY cloud management, and how to avoid them.

1) Cloud Spend Creep

The cloud is more than just a place to store information. It’s an opportunity to reach across time zones, to collaborate on sensitive and time-sensitive information, and to create a truly global business with fast response times and fast operating internals. For businesses new to this new normal, it’s common to attempt to meet the demands of a global economy head-on and ‘DIY’, building their own cloud resources to attempt their own structured architecture.

But ‘DIY’ cloud management like this often leads to uncontrolled spend; tagging, budgeting, forecasting, and cost accountability can be inconsistent across teams, especially where usage scales or projects multiply with a business’ growth. Even before this speed bump, there are significant management overheads attached to building your own of building a FinOps-style cloud-management discipline in-house; it’s not just buying the necessary tooling to build the thing, but also the process and reporting associated with it.

2) Security Gaps

Cloud infrastructure isn’t just an opportunity to burn money, though; it can also be a serious security risk for businesses that adopt it, particularly B2C businesses with ecommerce platforms. Failure to install proper protections with respect to login information, customer data and interconnected back-end portals can lead to serious cybersecurity incidents.

For many businesses, this is the point where managed cloud services become a practical way to close security and operational gaps without permanently expanding the internal team. While this plugs many of the back-end gaps that DIY-attempting businesses encounter, it is still worth understanding “shared responsibility”; cloud providers secure the underlying platform, but customers (i.e.: your business) still own identity and access management, configuration, data protection controls, and workload security.

3) Skills Shortages and Staffing

As such, staffing is a key consideration for businesses wanting to properly and thoroughly integrate cloud services into their business. Without the requisite knowledge to render safe the interactions between staff, customers and cloud-platform tech, shared responsibility can become a costly crown for businesses on the business end of a breach to bear.

Managed cloud services are less expensive overall, since you don’t need to advertise competitive cloud engineering positions in what is very much a seller’s market. Instead, you need competent IT staff to handle the integrating factors, a lower cost for a much smoother outcome.