Cloud Costs for Hong Kong SMEs: What to Budget

Many business owners assume the cloud is just "buying some space" for a few hundred dollars a month. Then the first invoice arrives.

Cloud is pay-as-you-go: the more you use, the more you pay. Knowing what you are billed for is how you keep it under control.

Six things that make up a cloud bill

• Compute: how many machines and how large, billed per second or per hour.
• Storage: files, databases and backups are priced separately; less data costs less.
• Data transfer: sending data out of the cloud is often charged separately, and it is the easiest line to blow up.
• Backup and disaster recovery: the more often you back up and the longer you keep it, the more it costs.
• Monitoring and security tooling: logging, protection and identity management, priced per item.
• Support plan: if you want a human immediately when things break, you buy a support tier.

Three costs people miss

First, data transfer. Staff downloading large files daily, or uncompressed website images, can cost more in transfer than in storage.

Second, test machines left running. A forgotten test server bills you every second, and you may not notice for a year.

Third, double backups. Two tools backing up the same system means paying twice.

Four questions before you move

• Must our data stay in a specific region?
• Which systems must stay fast, with no compromise?
• How many hours of downtime can we tolerate?
• If we leave in three years, how do we get our data out?

What Hong Kong companies should watch

Data residency, personal data privacy requirements and cross-border latency all affect which cloud and which region you choose.

You do not have to move everything at once. Many companies put new systems in the cloud first and leave legacy systems on-premise while they learn the costs.

Next step

Want a realistic picture of your cloud costs and where you can save? Talk to FROMDB about a cloud assessment.