Organisations need to check their bills closely and look out for hidden charges when deploying their applications in the cloud - and to check, especially, whether their cloud services include or exclude network services before they sign up.
That is the warning of Bernhard Hammerlindl, channels director in Global Cloud Services at Telefonica Digital, the IT and network services arm of Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica.
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"When companies go into production with their applications, a lot of people are shell-shocked when they go from development, using one site, and suddenly they have to pay the bill. On Rackspace, for example, you might be paying £1,000 per month for the infrastructure, but when they start using it, they have to pay another £800," says Hammerlindl.
The "surprise" is caused because during development, very little in terms of networking services are required. But when it goes into production these extra costs can quickly rack up.
"You go on the website and you select a virtual machine with configuration XYZ. Click, click, click and then you get the price. What this price doesn't give you is what the communication cost is," Hammerlindl adds. "It's a hidden cost and people only discover it when they go live.
In the cloud, though, the communications are the key, which is why so many major telecoms companies are so keen to move into the space, despite the current apparent dominance of Amazon Web Services.
"But in the long term, the battle among providers will be in the network as the compute and storage becomes more and more commodity," adds Hammerlindl, in an interview with Computing at the Salesforce.com London customer roadshow.
Telefonica, Hammerlindl says, deployed Salesforce.com to support its cloud billing project, developed with partner Cloudsense, which in turn supports Telefonica's new Instant Servers platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.
Unlike rival PaaS offerings, Telefonica fully supports mobile, says Hammerlindl, and includes the network servers that are typically an added extra in rival cloud services. "It's very suitable for mobile applications, where the demands of the infrastructure are very different to a standard cloud offering. That means you need to have a lot of flexibility in terms of availability of infrastructure."
Having established a first data centre in London to support Telefonica's cloud ambitions, the company is planning to open new data centres in Miami, Florida and Germany as it expands.
