Betfair’s Michael Bischoff Warns of Hidden Cloud Costs

Michael Bischoff CIO of Betfair has warned that public cloud computing offers several hidden costs to users and business, which must be taken into account, when undertaking data sifts. S

The operator Betfair used cloud services solutions under VMware Technology – vCloud Hybrid, a competitor to such cloud and data services as Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.  Speaking to Computing.co.uk Mr Bischoff made the following remarks regarding cloud services

“The most obvious ones are that there are a set of consumption-based services that are not obvious to everybody; for example, with bandwidth utilisation, they tend not to come with the sticker price that you often see,” he said.

“The more profound costs come with the internal management overheads with using a public cloud offering because ultimately [these solutions] are about unit costs of compute, storage, networking and whatever it might be.”

Bischoff explained that each of those unit costs have to be multiplied by the cost of security, compliance, management and monitoring and “all of the ancillary things that you have to do anyway”.

“All of that erodes the value proposition of any public cloud service, because you have to add all those costs back and I think that’s where many organisations including ourselves, compared [each type of offering] side by side, and realised that while the cost differentials are initially very appealing, when you add back all of the corporate overhead costs you have to carry, the value proposition is no longer as compelling,”