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✓ Maintaining speed, flexibility, and agility:  By providing a predictable, heterogeneous application infrastructure, organizations don’t get bogged down with a different approach to operations than to developing applications. Therefore, employees, customers, and suppliers can gain better access to the services they need. 

## Exploring the Costs 

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When you’re looking at the right balance of public cloud, private cloud, and data centers services, you have to take a step back and look at the overall costs of every environment. Start by understanding what it costs you to operate your data center. To do this, look at both direct and indirect costs related to the application or type of workload you want to move to the cloud. Some of these indirect costs are hard to evaluate, making it difficult to accurately predict the actual costs of running any given application in your company. 

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of possible costs: 

✓ Server costs:  With this and all other hardware components, you’re specifically interested in the total annual cost of ownership, which normally consists of the cost of hardware support plus some amortization cost for the purchase of the hardware. Additionally, a particular server may be used to support several different workloads. The more disparate workloads a server manages, the higher the support costs. 

✓ Storage costs:  What are the management and support costs for the storage hardware required for the data associated with this application? Storage costs may be very high for certain types of applications, such as e-mail or complex analytics. 

✓ Network costs:  When a web application you host internally, such as e-mail or collaboration, is moved to the cloud, this may reduce strain on your network. However, it can substantially increase bandwidth requirements. 

