Anybody who is considering a move to the Cloud knows that the greatest economic motivation for Cloud Computing is the pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-need utility computing benefit, right? Deal with spikes in demand much more cost-effectively, the public Cloud service providers gush, since we can spread the load over many customers and pass the savings from our economies of scale on to you. The utility benefit is also a central premise of Private Clouds. Build a Private Cloud for your enterprise, the vendors promise, and you can achieve the same economies of scale as Public Clouds without all that risk.

Unfortunately, what sounds too good to be true usually is. There are a number of gotchas on both the Public and Private Cloud provider sides that limit—or even prevent—organizations from obtaining a full measure of the utility benefit. Let’s go back to economics class and take a closer look …