Let's tackle Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is the complete financial picture of IT costs, comparing cloud services to owning your own hardware on-premises.
TCO includes not just the hardware price, but also all the hidden operational costs over time.
Engagement Message
What is one hidden cost of owning a car besides the purchase price?
Owning hardware has many hidden costs: the power to run the servers, the cooling for the server room, physical security, and the IT staff needed for maintenance.
These ongoing operational expenses can easily double or triple the initial hardware investment over a few years.
Engagement Message
Which of these ongoing costs do you think is most often forgotten?
Cloud computing, on the other hand, bundles most of these costs into the monthly price. You don't pay separately for power, cooling, or data center rent.
This makes your costs more predictable and transparent, allowing you to focus on your business instead of managing infrastructure.
Engagement Message
How does this shift in responsibility help a small business?
To compare properly, you use a TCO calculator. You input all your on-premises costs (servers, power, staff) and compare it to the estimated cost of running the same workload on AWS.
This helps you build a business case to show stakeholders the true potential savings of moving to the cloud.
Engagement Message
What time frame (e.g., 1 year, 3 years) is best for comparing these costs?
A strong business case shows both the "hard" cost savings (lower TCO) and the "soft" business benefits like faster deployment, better reliability, and increased agility.
Quantifying everything is powerful: "We can save $100,000 over 3 years and launch new features in minutes instead of months."
Engagement Message
Which benefit—cost savings or agility—do you think is more important to a fast-growing company?
