Question

A retail company's CFO is comparing the cost of running their e-commerce platform on-premises versus moving it to Google Cloud. The IT director insists they should evaluate the decision using Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) rather than just comparing server purchase prices. What best describes why TCO is the more appropriate measure for this comparison?

Accepted Answer

TCO captures the full direct and indirect costs of ownership over time, including hardware, power, cooling, maintenance, staffing, and downtime, giving a complete cost picture

Answer

TCO measures only the upfront capital expenditure required to purchase physical servers and networking equipment

Answer

TCO calculates the projected revenue growth a company will achieve after adopting cloud services

Answer

TCO is a metric that guarantees cloud will always be cheaper than any on-premises deployment