Higher data center costs unlikely to cause exodus to public cloud

A debate has been raging since cloud computing entered the mainstream: which is the cheaper venue for enterprise customers — cloud or on-premises data centers? This debate has proved futile for two reasons. First, the characteristics of any specific application will dictate which venue is more expensive — there is no simple, unequivocal answer. Second — the question implies that a buyer would choose a cloud or on-premises data center primarily because it is cheaper. This is not necessarily the case.

Infrastructure is not a commodity. Most users will not choose a venue purely because it costs less. Users might choose to keep workloads within their data centers or at a colo because they want to be confident they are fully compliant with legislation and / or regulatory requirements, or to be situated close to end users. They might choose cloud computing for workloads that require rapid scalability, or to access platform services further up the stack. Of course, costs matter to CIOs and CFOs alike, but cloud computing, on-premises data centers and colos all deliver value beyond their relative cost differences.