As presence in the public cloud grows, the next step for many organizations and system administrators is to optimize their cost and simplify administration. When evaluating potential opportunities to reduce cost within the Azure environment, the use of ExpressRoute should be considered. If available, ExpressRoute can dramatically decrease the per GB cost of data transferred outbound from Azure, in addition to providing a secure and dedicated connection to the Azure infrastructure.
Without ExpressRoute, bandwidth pricing can be significant on a pay-as-you-go basis. For example, 100 TB of data sent from Azure on this pricing structure would cost approximately $7,875 per month in the West US 2 region. Leveraging a 10 Gbps connection to Azure would cost ~$3,400 for ExpressRoute’s port speed fee, then that same 100 TB of data transfer would now cost only ~$2,560 at the reduced data transfer rate. This new model not only reduces overall cloud spend (at a combined monthly cost of $5,960, nearly $2,000 cheaper) it also provides the security and business continuity that the pay-as-you-go model lacks.
An important point to remember when migrating to the cloud or expanding on the existing cloud footprint is that without either a VPN or ExpressRoute, the traffic to and from Azure is traversing the Public Internet. For obvious reasons, this can be a significant cybersecurity concern – especially when that data contains business critical or PII data. Having ExpressRoute provides an organization the level of security offered through a VPN-like private connection, in addition to a secondary circuit built-in for business continuity.
Building ExpressRoute into your organization’s cloud footprint can provide both security and continuity – all while reducing your overall spend in the cloud. Further refinements can be made through the use of premium add-on (for connectivity across all global Azure regions), an unlimited bandwidth option, and the ability to scale bandwidth up or down as needed.
To learn more, contact us at info@invisocorp.com.
