Are You Cloud Ready? Q & A on providing flexible consumption models

Note: This is the fourth in a multi-part blog series on Cloud Ready security questions. You can follow the entire Security Questions series here, and follow the Barracuda Cloud Ready blog here.

As you’ve probably heard (you know, since we won’t stop talking about it), we announced new benefits to Barracuda’s Cloud Ready program at the end of last month, and also kicked off this blog series to continue the conversation around some of the important cloud questions that customers should be asking their current vendors. 

Last week we talked about the importance of deploying solutions that natively integrate with the public cloud fabric, as well as auto scaling for performance and capacity. Today, we grabbed number six from the list of questions that you should be asking vendors before a cloud migration — here we go: 

6. Does your solution provide flexible consumption models including pay-as-you-go and metered billing? 

The cloud changes everything when it comes to pricing. In the cloud, customers are no longer setting up and managing their own infrastructure — they’re essentially renting someone else’s.  But unlike earlier hosting centers that had a similar model (we’ll build it for you type of thing), cloud infrastructures are designed to scale up and down based on workloads, time of day, and other factors. This means that customers can match the costs of infrastructure to consumption, which offers significant savings, and also allows the ability to maintain quality of service regardless of what’s running in the cloud. 

When products like security are added into a customer’s cloud instance, the security vendor’s ability to “match” the way that customers pay for cloud usage becomes very important. For example, one of Barracuda’s customers is a European healthcare provider that licenses some of our security solutions with an annual “bring-your-own-license” model that runs 24/7 all year long. In contrast, this customer provides some services only during specific hours, and for those applications, they wanted to leverage “pay-as-you-go” cloud licenses so they only have to pay when those applications are running.  

In a totally different situation, another customer of ours is subject to extreme usage spikes — often many times that of their typical average network traffic. They deployed a Barracuda NextGen Firewall in their public cloud environment that will auto-scale as many instances as required.  After deployment, an instance occurred where they had over five times the typical traffic running through their cloud applications, and yet still never allowed their retail customers to see any degradation in service. 

None of these solutions would be possible with traditional on-premises infrastructure, but they also require vendors such as Barracuda whose licensing options can be matched to the cloud infrastructure being consumed.

We hope these topics help you address the cloud readiness of your current vendor’s offerings because as you can see, there’s a lot to consider when choosing the right vendor for your cloud scenario. Please tune back here in a couple days as we continue this series. In the meantime, here are a few resources and related posts the check out:

• Barracuda on AWS

• Barracuda on Azure

• Barracuda Cloud Ready Program

• Cloud Ready Press Release