UKCloud: We ARE cheaper than Microsoft or AWS online storage British-based infrastructure services-slinger UKCloud says it is “fighting back” against the giants of industry by slashing the price of online storage. Customers looking for cheap online storage with data volumes above 1,000 TB will pay 1.46 pence per GB per month, down 66 per cent, and importantly there are no additional …
They have two but their standard product doesn't actually do any cross-site replication. For that, you pay extra (!).
There's no triple-site replication like S3, and there is no durability SLA.
Hansford may be conning the gullible schmoes of the public sector, but the rest of us aren't fooled.
How do you differentiate then? Disk manufacturers, Apple, Unix all use decimal, Microsoft and a few others use binary. Decades ago it was almost irrelevant but now the difference between PB and PiB is in the many Terabyte range which is significant in any calculation.
I'm not a nutter, I'm just better at IT than you are. Many people wrongly interpret the (non existent) difference between a terabyte and 930 gibibytes as "formatting losses", you think they are the clever ones?!
No, jusrt GCHQ datagrabs, but that's your bunch so no problem there, right? Except the 5Eyes love capturing anything in transit anywhere and I continue to pick up worries in the crypto community about the NSA, at the least, readily cracking HTTPS. {Shrug} Oh, they all like to share.
Nowadays, the only hope is that I'm not proctoscope worthy. I think. Maybe?
"they are not a US company or have a US parent company ... I'm sure that despite Safe Harbour 2.0, they are making that a primary selling point when pitching to customers."
It depends on where and who those customers are. If they're in the EU or UK customers intending to hold data of EU data subjects it's not going to be good enough post May's reneging on ECHR.
That's no really the problem. I already know my data cap with Comcast so everything else falls out from that. My problem with Spideroak was that there was no way in Hell I could keep synchronized backups beyond 1.2 TB, the bandwidth simply wasn't there.
Unlimited backups isn't relevant without thick pipes.
is pretty impossible to predict. I have done lots of work with AWS and when trying to convince a typical customer that some kind of cloud based service will be better for them, "how much will it cost" is not an unreasonable question. The answer is always "it depends" but even more so with AWS, even trying to estimate a price for matching a current setup elsewhere is just that, an estimate and still has a whole heap of "it depends" attached to it.
How on Earth can you think "...that some kind of cloud based service will be better for them,..."if you can't even price it up? FFS
I on the other hand, spend my time trying to undo the sales spin, and remind customers it's "simply someone else's servers" and expensive ones at that, and they'll be at the mercy of price hikes, currency fluctuations, gouging, etc.
I'm hoping you really know IT, because you REALLY don't know business! ROI? NPV? P&L? Ringing any bells?
The mobile phone networks and cable providers long since mastered the art of creating elaborately complex pricing plans designed for one single reason: to make it nigh impossible for customers to make informed price comparisons.
We avoided deliberately deceptive services from American owned provider, and purchased services from a Netherlands company which charges a fixed rate with clear specs and SLAs. Not that hard. It just works.
The question of whether it is better to put government data and services with a UK SME or a global public cloud provider is an interesting one but I don’t think that UK or non-UK ownership of the parent company has much to do with it any longer. That’s just continuing FUD. In any case, the long term ownership of whoever you choose to put your data with probably comes down at least as much to who buys them in the future as anything else.
Cost is more interesting… but if cost of storage is your driver then you may not be starting in the right place. You also need to consider breadth of functionality, long term resilience of service and various other factors. Yes, AWS and Azure pricing is complex – they are complex services with lots of flexibility… why wouldn’t the pricing be complex? You’re only going to get the most out of them by embracing that complexity and by taking advantage of the pricing and service features that allow you to control your costs sensibly. If you can’t, or won’t, do that, again, maybe public cloud isn’t for you. Which is not to suggest that doing so is trivial.
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