Assessing Cloud Infrastructure Costs in Communications-Intensive Applications

By deploying cloud infrastructure services, companies strive at achieving faster time to market, improved scalability, lower up-front costs, and lower IT management overhead, among other benefits. However, in longer term, the use of cloud infrastructure may incur significant costs; furthermore, these costs depend both on the required infrastructure resources and on the mode of infrastructure deployment. Therefore, the choice of a particular deployment mode should be justified with a systematic analysis of the associated costs. In this paper, a model for assessing the costs of alternative cloud infrastructure deployment scenarios is introduced. This model decomposes the infrastructure costs …