For companies planning cloud deployments, creating accurate cost models and forecasts across the ever-growing number of cloud providers and choices can be overwhelming. Businesses are also leveraging more than one cloud provider so accurate management of cloud costs becomes more complex.
According to a recent RightScale survey of more than 600 companies, 68% of respondents reported that they are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. In addition, new cloud providers continue to emerge and existing providers frequently change pricing, making it difficult to keep manual spreadsheets up-to-date.
To facilitate better budgeting, RightScale has unveiled a free cloud cost forecasting website called PlanforCloud. IT organizations will find tools to model various architectures and usage patterns, access up-to-date pricing from a variety of cloud providers, and produce detailed cost reports in just a few minutes.
Free forecast
PlanForCloud can be used by any business to forecast clouds costs, including those that are not currently RightScale customers or users of cloud services. No cloud provider accounts or current cloud deployments are required to use the site or calculate cloud costs.
The service enables sophisticated modeling of the components of cloud deployments, including servers, storage, database and data transfer, as well as usage scenarios that incorporate growth, seasonality and other variability in the consumption of cloud resources. These can be done based on up-to-date prices from major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure and Rackspace, and the list is growing.
"Predicting and managing cloud costs is a critical component of realizing the ROI of cloud computing," said Peter Adam, Business Development Director at Add Latent Ltd. "The forecasting offered by PlanForCloud coupled with the cost management capabilities we can get through the RightScale Cloud Management Platform, enables us to track our past usage, budget for future cloud costs and ultimately, be more efficient with our IT spend."