How often do you hear - “Does Cloud really save money?”

[CloudGeek]

How often do you hear - “Does Cloud really save money?”

 

Here is from DfE Report out today:

 

Ark Multi Academy Trust (MAT) has employed a ‘Cloud First’ approach across the MAT to improve collaboration and communication within and between its schools.

 

Providing cloud solutions (where data is stored, maintained and managed remotely and accessed through the internet rather than on a local hard drive or server) has allowed practitioners and school leaders to focus on the things that matter – teaching and learning in the classroom, supporting effective professional development, and providing students with the support and resources that they need.

 

Core to the MAT’s software selection is the ability to extract and use staff and student level data to derive actionable insights that can support the network. For example, they are able to support reductions in teacher workload by automating the transfer of assessment data between two systems. Additionally, Ark has reported saving over 50% on on-premise hardware by moving to the cloud.

 

“There are a huge number of cloud software services out there, and it makes no sense for all of our schools to use different ones. It is when we aggregate data and information across our schools and from different tools that we can really start to leverage the strength of being in a network. It is a bonus that this is often more cost effective as well!”

 

Lauren Thorpe

Head of Data & Systems Strategy, Ark Schools

 

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/791931/DfE-Education_Technology_Strategy.pdf

[Steve21]

About as often as we hear how much it saves without any explanation or figures that back it up I guess...

 

Without either a huge amount of cost being wasted originally before going to cloud, or a huge leverage in costs due to the number of schools ark have I’d be interested to know where this 50% exists from (unless you’re taking off things like larger internet connections etc from that hardware cost)

 

the quote attached to that paragraph talks about merging cloud services to one supplier not savings vs local?

 

Steve

[DrBeaker]

Hang on a minute, this is the same department that "... is using 10 different IT systems to manage academies"

 

https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-dfe-using-10-different-it-systems-manage-academies

 

This tech news is nothing new and really isn't something most techs haven't already been doing. They'll be saying "we recommend virtualisation of servers" next, only 10x years behind the times then

[Roberto]

When I worked for LSFC I saved them something like £12k a year by moving backup to a cloud service (https://itsalwaysmyproblem.com/2018/08/26/backup-to-the-cloud/), and possibly something similar to deliver a redundant ADFS setup with load balanced Azure instances instead of an on-prem solution that offered equivalent redundancy and availability.

 

Can’t discuss numbers sorry but where I work now is “cloud first”, and often using cloud-based XaaS to deploy some services because our requirements for redundancy and low RPO/RTO is often better met by cloud.

Edited April 3, 2019 by Roberto

[Steve21]

But Roberto that’s a prime example from your website of my issue with this cost saving of cloud, you’re not talking about the same comparisons overall imo

 

How are you spending £20k a year to back up 5TB is beyond me. £1500 ish just to store tapes per year?

 

We replaced our backup server recently and including onsite backup server with LTO8 for external 8TB~ spent under £10k for server, tapes and 3 years licensing Veeam, that’s under 3.4k a year (even if you assume it’s 3 years life cycle rather than 5), so using that figure under half the cloud cost in your example, no idea why arcserve is so high priced unless it’s many physical servers?

 

if I understand right, you’re talking about replacing a tape every other week? If you’re replacing 20 tapes in a year? So that’s equivalent to two uses per tape before they’re getting binned.

 

Etc etc but yeah I understand every site is different but this just seems like the comparison isn’t exactly the normal setup you’re be comparing to when taking about the migrations, most schools won’t have budgets of £20k just for backups to save 50% on etc

 

Steve

[Achandler]

What happens is you have a legacy, expensive to run system, that is probably unreliable.

 

You replace that with a cloud system, so you compare an antique system with a new one, and boom cost savings. Could you have replaced it with a new local system, we just gloss over that because it doesn't suit the agenda or the goals.

 

Anything cloud based always ignores any connection charges as well.

[LTurner3692]

I can understand and agree with some things going cloudbase, but i cant see why you would want everything cloud base!

[Chuckster]

Going cloud was cost prohibitive when I looked into it 18 months ago. It was cheaper if I brought a server and whacked in large capacity 15k RPM drives. The TCO over 3 years of on-premise server was far cheaper than going cloud.

 

How are schools even affording it?

 

The only cloud solution we have right now is Office 365 - and that's completely free.

 

I get that when you factor in cloud solutions, not only are you supposedly saving money in the long run, you're also saving elsewhere such as the running cost of electricity, purchase of hardware, turning off air cons etc. But until they really come down in price - and some vendors aren't forthcoming with educational pricing, by the way, it makes going cloud for my school a little out of our league.

[Roberto]

But Roberto that’s a prime example from your website of my issue with this cost saving of cloud, you’re not talking about the same comparisons overall imo

 

How are you spending £20k a year to back up 5TB is beyond me. £1500 ish just to store tapes per year?

 

We replaced our backup server recently and including onsite backup server with LTO8 for external 8TB~ spent under £10k for server, tapes and 3 years licensing Veeam, that’s under 3.4k a year (even if you assume it’s 3 years life cycle rather than 5), so using that figure under half the cloud cost in your example, no idea why arcserve is so high priced unless it’s many physical servers?

 

if I understand right, you’re talking about replacing a tape every other week? If you’re replacing 20 tapes in a year? So that’s equivalent to two uses per tape before they’re getting binned.

 

Etc etc but yeah I understand every site is different but this just seems like the comparison isn’t exactly the normal setup you’re be comparing to when taking about the migrations, most schools won’t have budgets of £20k just for backups to save 50% on etc

 

Steve

 

£1500 is the quote I had for off-site storage of data tapes in a vault iirc.

The replacement rate is based on a reasonable wastage figure plus the need to archive data, so it’s not a standard rotation. LSFC has a lot of servers, and the arcserve quote was competitive with the alternative. Not sure what else to say, the quotes had a lot of scrutiny from slt, governors audit committee and they wanted it.

[mikeprice]

when I was looking at stuff that was 'in the cloud' most costs were ignored due to the advantages of 'it being in the cloud"

 

No numbers, no specifics - naff all

 

The above quotes seem to be related to having a MAT that can access all the schools data accessible from anywhere in any school to allow all the data to be analysed on a MAT basis

 

Hmmm

 

Maybe they could do the same with a decent network setup - so, as said above, the problems is having an out-of-date system with a lack of investment over many years being compared to a cloud system based on a profit making enterprise, with a professional marketing department, who ESTIMATE a massive saving in costs

 

But if the current system was updated and adapted for a multi-site system (which should have been part of the formation of the MAT but, from what I have seen here, often isn't - 'cos IT) could offer similar data access without lobbing loads of money at an external profit making company

 

They need to involve professional independant IT people to analyse the different possibilities and to assess the benefits of each. In other words - do it the way a business would do it

I know this would cost money - consultants are never cheap and working out which ones are competent and truly independent is a black art - but that is what it needs

 

Teachers and SMT (i.e. ex teachers) are not trained to assess IT systems for long term viability and costs - we are far better at it but most of us are too busy and don't have an overview of the whole education software environment (apologies to anyone who has the time and staff to be able to - I haven't met you!). When I was in industry we had a whole team that did this - and they couldn't keep up and called in consultants on many occasions.

 

So basically - every cloud 'solution' I have been presented with has collapsed as soon as I started looking at on-going costs. I was unable to find a better cloud offering because I was a lone IT tech and couldn't really afford to spend many many days researching what is available and visiting suppliers and reference sites

 

there could be a wonderful cloud solution out there - but I haven't seen it

[smarties11]

£1500 is the quote I had for off-site storage of data tapes in a vault iirc.

The replacement rate is based on a reasonable wastage figure plus the need to archive data, so it’s not a standard rotation. LSFC has a lot of servers, and the arcserve quote was competitive with the alternative. Not sure what else to say, the quotes had a lot of scrutiny from slt, governors audit committee and they wanted it.

 

£1500 to store tapes off-site? Our local solicitors does this for us FOC! If the tapes are encrypted there's no need for anything radical here.

[mikeprice]

On a side note - in 1999 (I was still working in industry) we de-commissioned an old system and replaced it with a Unix package system

Which was fine - but as it contained lots of financial data the data had to be backed up and securely stored for at least 6 years

 

So it was all backed up onto tape and sent to secure fireproof storage and the database disks were copied and stored in a special room in one of the mainframe computer suits

 

OK - sounds good - I wasn't involved in any way

 

Sometime during the year 2000 (about july ish) I came across the stored disks and asked what they were etc

 

Turned out that no-one had considered how to recover the data if they needed to

so

no-one had thought to keep a system disk - so we had no-way of booting a system

We had no machine that could run the right operating system - or database system

Even if we had a system that could run the system and had a disk that could boot it up - it stopped working at 11:59 p.m. on 31 December 1999 (OK it would kinda work - cos I tried it - but whether or not it would correctly calculate date difference etc was totally up in the air and interest payments etc etc tend to depend on this)

 

Clearly we could ask the manufacturers for a copy of the op. system - but as it was many version out of date I would have more chance of winning the lottery than getting hold of a version that would actually run it and get the database running

 

I thought it was hilarious - as did the project leader who I had known for many years - apparently Finance were horrified

 

I was made redundant a year later - wonder if they ever needed it

 

jus saying

[Roberto]

£1500 to store tapes off-site? Our local solicitors does this for us FOC! If the tapes are encrypted there's no need for anything radical here.

 

That’s good of your local solicitor, but unfortunately that service wasn’t available when I went looking for quotes. I was given a set of requirements based on SLT and external auditors recommendations to our governors audit committee and I made the best effort I could to find cost effective ways of meeting their requirements.

[Mr.Ben]

What service level agreement do you have with the solicitors?

[Tefters]

That DfE report is the BIGGEST load of waffly spherical objects I’ve heard this year... Yes! I am comparing that to the BrexIt garbage as well.

 

‘Cloud First’ approach - You mean the new latest buzz term and jumped on the band wagon to look like modern and hip...

 

Allowed practitioners and school leaders to focus on what matters, teaching and learning - REALLY?!?! Since when have SLT cared about IT unless it’s broke or they don’t have all the toys they want.

 

Automating transfer of assessment data between 2 systems - Yeah... because that’s cloud only...

 

Saving of 50% - Compared to your old archaic setup that was costing you a fortune because no-one was proactively looking at new solutions each year to save money... For the last 6 years I’ve saved huge amounts year on year thanks to new tech and reinvested into further new techs to make life easier, more efficient and slim line.

 

Cloud DOES NOT save you money majority of the time when comparing solutions properly. It’s the new lazy ‘outsourcing’ method and I can’t wait to see what people start saying when those costs start ramping up.

 

What about your primary and secondary schools in villages with only ADSL connections? Or secondary’s paying £8/9k on 100/100 lines which are already heavily used for normal use let alone offloading semi-file servers etc...

 

Cloud is being advertised and pushed by everyone like Apple marketing and it’s stupid.

Yes cloud does have its place and in some MAT’s / new schools it might be worth it but to issue statements of ‘Cloud First’ or ‘Cloud Future’ is stupid and laughable.

Edited April 5, 2019 by elsiegee40
Language

[ITGURU]

But Roberto that’s a prime example from your website of my issue with this cost saving of cloud, you’re not talking about the same comparisons overall imo

 

How are you spending £20k a year to back up 5TB is beyond me. £1500 ish just to store tapes per year?

 

We replaced our backup server recently and including onsite backup server with LTO8 for external 8TB~ spent under £10k for server, tapes and 3 years licensing Veeam, that’s under 3.4k a year (even if you assume it’s 3 years life cycle rather than 5), so using that figure under half the cloud cost in your example, no idea why arcserve is so high priced unless it’s many physical servers?

 

if I understand right, you’re talking about replacing a tape every other week? If you’re replacing 20 tapes in a year? So that’s equivalent to two uses per tape before they’re getting binned.

 

Etc etc but yeah I understand every site is different but this just seems like the comparison isn’t exactly the normal setup you’re be comparing to when taking about the migrations, most schools won’t have budgets of £20k just for backups to save 50% on etc [emoji14]

 

Steve

I run arcserve and LTO tape backups. I've never replaced tapes...I check their health once a year and even after several years of use some tales still have 20% life remaining . never had a tape failure and have to do a student data restore at least once a week and always successful so don't know why tapes need to be replaced so often...

[DrCheese]

I've looked into the cloud for our veeam onm prem backups, but for the level of backup I have at the moment (Monthly 12 months, weekly 4 weeks, daily 14 days) It would cost us a fortune.

 

In terms of moving all our files up to sharepoint/onedrive I'm really antsy about the lack of longterm backup offered at present - I know deleted files can be restored for a period of time but it's not the same. 365 backup options are incredibly expensive at the moment.

[HPlum78]

Backing up your on prem data to the cloud is an interesting one and its not as straightforward as a direct comparison. You have to have a good reason for considering architecting a solution like that and in the most part it's not cost effective the ingress and egress costs alone make it too expensive for most.

 

The statement about cloud not being able to save you money is something I don't agree with. If you compare a web server on prem with a direct copy (infrastructure and all) to the cloud then you are not taking the right parts of a cloud service. If you set the same Web site up in a SaaS offering on the correct consumption plan and scaling there is no way that you are able to deliver it for the pence a day that you would pay in Azure.

 

I have covered this in many posts just like this one, if you have an on prem depenancy on a service then keep it on prem prem. If not look towards the cloud but the right parts of the cloud. If you as standing up a VM then you are are not going to save money that's not where the savings are realised. Look at PaaS and SaaS as that's where the savings are.

Edited April 5, 2019 by HPlum78

[Bedders]

Backing up your on prem data to the cloud is an interesting one and its not as straightforward as a direct comparison. You have to have a good reason for considering architecting a solution like that and in the most part it's not cost effective the ingress and egress costs alone make it too expensive for most.

 

The statement about cloud not being able to save you money is something I don't agree with. If you compare a web server on prem with a direct copy (infrastructure and all) to the cloud then you are not taking the right parts of a cloud service. If you set the same Web site up in a SaaS offering on the correct consumption plan and scaling there is no way that you are able to deliver it for the pence a day that you would pay in Azure.

 

I have covered this in many posts just like this one, if you have an on prem depenancy on a service then keep it on prem prem. If not look towards the cloud but the right parts of the cloud. If you as standing up a VM then you are are not going to save money that's not where the savings are realised. Look at PaaS and SaaS as that's where the savings are.

 

We've looked into hosting various of our business applications on cloud-based services in the past. From what I've found the cost of re-engineering them to a cloud-based service, as it includes us learning how to do that, versus updating it and keeping it on site is much more expensive over the lifetime we're looking at (typically 5-10 years depending on the application). Typically after the third or fourth year cloud versions become more expensive.

 

When I consider that Microsoft's profits have gone up in recent years, and yet they've almost certainly had to invest heavily in new hardware/datacentres etc. in order to bring Azure to where it is today... This subscription-based pricing must be really raking it in for them!

[localzuk]

I have to question the original post saying Ark saved money by going cloud. From what I've seen, they saved money by consolidating systems. Surely that saving would've come if it had been done in a cloudy way OR an onsite way?

 

I mean, we've saved a huge amount of money in our Trust by consolidating systems. But it isn't cloud. Instead of each school having a server, we have a single cluster at our central site hosting everything and P2P ethernet connections connecting all the schools back here. Will save us £30k every 5 years in hardware alone. We have a single (well, except one school but that will change at some point), wireless system - so 1 controller, 1 thing to manage etc... We have a single domain, etc...

 

I'm not sold on cloud tech being a money saver yet to be honest.

[elsiegee40]

. This subscription-based pricing must be really raking it in for them!

And there’s the nub of it.

 

Vendors love subscription pricing. Guaranteed income!

 

It ties you in and they can creep the costs up and make it difficult for you to move.

 

One off purchases are volatile. You get few for ages and then a rush. It’s much easier to manage business cashflow when your customers are paying a monthly subscription.

 

It doesn’t necessarily make it best value for the customer though.

[LeMarchand]

And there’s the nub of it.

 

Vendors love subscription pricing. Guaranteed income!

 

It ties you in and they can creep the costs up and make it difficult for you to move.

 

*cough*Microlibrarian*cough*

[DrBeaker]

That DfE report is the BIGGEST load of waffly spherical objects I’ve heard this year... Yes! I am comparing that to the BrexIt garbage as well.

 

‘Cloud First’ approach - You mean the new latest buzz term and jumped on the band wagon to look like modern and hip...

 

Allowed practitioners and school leaders to focus on what matters, teaching and learning - REALLY?!?! Since when have SLT cared about IT unless it’s broke or they don’t have all the toys they want.

 

Automating transfer of assessment data between 2 systems - Yeah... because that’s cloud only...

 

Saving of 50% - Compared to your old archaic setup that was costing you a fortune because no-one was proactively looking at new solutions each year to save money... For the last 6 years I’ve saved huge amounts year on year thanks to new tech and reinvested into further new techs to make life easier, more efficient and slim line.

 

Cloud DOES NOT save you money majority of the time when comparing solutions properly. It’s the new lazy ‘outsourcing’ method and I can’t wait to see what people start saying when those costs start ramping up.

 

What about your primary and secondary schools in villages with only ADSL connections? Or secondary’s paying £8/9k on 100/100 lines which are already heavily used for normal use let alone offloading semi-file servers etc...

 

Cloud is being advertised and pushed by everyone like Apple marketing and it’s stupid.

Yes cloud does have its place and in some MAT’s / new schools it might be worth it but to issue statements of ‘Cloud First’ or ‘Cloud Future’ is stupid and laughable.

 

Since when have SLT cared about IT unless it’s broke or they don’t have all the toys they want.

 

Completely agree. Especially with unless you tell them the old kit they refuse to upgrade is going to impact on exam results.

 

Saving of 50% - Compared to your old archaic setup that was costing you a fortune because no-one was proactively looking at new solutions each year to save money... For the last 6 years I’ve saved huge amounts year on year thanks to new tech and reinvested into further new techs to make life easier, more efficient and slim line.

 

Again it can't just be me sick to the back teeth of being proactive and not being acknowledged for it, nor given any more budget as a result. Those cost savings and improvement should be recognised. In private sector and industry you used to get bonuses for that.

[DrCheese]

I don't think we can ignore the cloud (Nor should we) but I've equally seen the results of organisations just randomly dumping everything up to the cloud without thinking things through - Usually resulting in extremely unsecure setups that lead to Data Breaches within 5 minutes.

 

Our local council moved from box.com to Google Drive for a system that schools were using to send data between each other - But it was originally setup that any Google account could be used on it, anyone could forward the links on and anyone could modify the share permissions. When I told them that no, I'm not authorising this as it's unsecure they sent back a curt email going "Well the government use it, so it must be secure" & accusations of not moving with the times

 

Yes, it is - But only done correctly. I & other NMs in the city wrote back with a list of ways it was a data breach nightmare and eventually they relented/sorted it.

 

So yes, we should be moving to the cloud when it's cheap and easy to do so, but we've got to do it right, consider what we're gaining/losing, manage the risks & not just rush straight in because its the "New shiny thing!"

[mikeprice]

Good points above - main point I like is that once you are totally committed to doing everything 'in the cloud' then the supplier can increase their prices whenever they want

 

 

As I found out when I was looking for library systems - asking about future prices rises resulted in the salesperson quickly changing the subject