Page 253 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

CL OUD COMPUTING’S PORTABILITY GO T CHA

It can take weeks or months to move a petabyte of data
from one cloud to another, depending on data transfer speeds,
Hoffman said. And Amazon charges 10 cents per gigabyte to
transfer data out of S3, which comes to $100,000 per petabyte.
(That’s after you’ve already spent $100,000 or more in trans-
fer fees moving the data into S3.)

Amazon estimates it would take one to two days to import
or export 5 TB of data over a 100-Mbps connection. It has in
beta testing a work-around called AWS Import/Export that
lets customers load or remove data using portable storage de-
vices, bypassing the network. Amazon recommends that ap-
proach if loading data would take a week or more.
What’s the lesson? Getting started in the cloud may be

fast, cheap, and easy, but the longer you’re there, the harder it
is to move. As data accumulates, IT needs to monitor not just
what it’s spending on cloud storage, but also how big the tab
to get out is. Price out an exit plan.

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