When businesses sign up for cloud hosting plans, they can enjoy higher agility and business continuity, on-demand resource scalability and affordability. However, what is more important for the owners to understand is whether or not cloud solutions are right for their business. Cloud hosting plans are popular because it is believed that they help business owners to cut down on their capital and operational costs. With the emergence of so many cloud providers in the market, the prices have also gone up. So, before you sign up for any cloud hosting solution, it is necessary to examine its pricing structure. This is why enterprise cloud storage pricing is not as easy as it sounds. You will come across many vendors who offer free storage. However, in time, you will see that you actually need far more storage than what the plan is offering you. Your task is to find out what the storage costs are and then see if the plan will benefit your business.
Types of enterprise cloud storage pricing:
- The pay-per-unit storage model is where you pay only for resources you use. This is perhaps the best suited model for all enterprise owners because you get to decide on the storage you are likely to need, and then you pay for that amount only. When you require additional storage, you can simply upgrade the plan.
- The pay-per-user plan for enterprise cloud storage pricing refers to a system where the business pays a flat fee depending on number of users or computers which are needed for performing backups. While this is just the opposite of the pay-per-use model, it is easy for businesses to follow.
- The capped plans or tiered plans are those which will take into account the total storage amount you need as well as the number of users for backups. When the business grows, you may need to move onto a higher tier.
- The hybrid plans are not desirable at all for businesses which need storage because of their high prices and complexities involved. The capped plans will at least give you benefits of pay-per-unit or pay-per-user models to the smaller companies. But hybrid plans force you to pay both, right from the start.
When you evaluate enterprise cloud storage pricing choices, you should not simply go by the price. There are other features like data encryption, customer support systems and data redundancy etc which must all be considered too. All vendors have to guarantee a certain uptime to their client enterprises. This is something which is mentioned clearly in the SLAs that every business owner must read carefully. Moreover, the more often you access the data, the higher will be your storage costs. There are also cases of vendors asking for more fees to process data retrieval requests. If you have to move the data in or out of clouds you will have to pay a fee. This is not much when you deal with daily data transfers but it can be a big amount when you plan to shift large volumes of data.
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