Immerse > Operational Costs
Why
Operational estimation can cover three distinct aspects: technology, people, and support/maintenance. In the current era, businesses leveraging the cloud is a common occurrence. This makes estimating infrastructure costs more accurate and effortless with structured approaches. Estimation is commonly regarded as a process of judging or providing a rough calculation for a value. It is important to budget different costs to run a company smoothly. Estimating the operations upfront is crucial to provide the business with a clear idea on the amount to be allocated for operations.
It helps to:
- Avoid underutilizing resources and incurring unwanted costs
- Identify ROI for the business
How
One of the best proven methodologies for operational estimation is TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). This process is regarded as one of the most basic and important processes in cost estimation. During any process, it is important to capture the qualitative and non-functional requirements of the product coming in from the product architecture (reliability, scalability, etc.). Under the process of identifying TCO, many key activities should be carried out under three stages.
- Identifying Startup Costs - These are the costs incurred while the software is in production.
- Cloud capacity planning
- Consultancy costs
- Workforce estimations
- Software license costs
- Identifying Running Costs - These are the costs incurred while the software is in production.
- Disaster recovery and high availability related estimations
- Continuous capacity planning
- Security Costs
- Downtime costs
- Identifying Retirement Costs