Free tool lets Canadian SMEs forecast Cloud usage
Stephen Law
Electronics Engineering CloudNew feature in CANARIE's DAIR Cloud helps businesses optimize their product design
CANARIE, an Ottawa-based player in Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation, announced the launch of CloudTracker, a free and innovative metrics reporting tool that gives Canada’s tech small and medium enterprises (SMEs) the ability to accurately forecast what their product or service will cost to operate on a commercial cloud. 
By building and prototyping their products and services on CANARIE’s free DAIR Cloud and using CloudTracker, SMEs can make informed business decisions by evaluating multiple design scenarios. Cloud computing enables businesses to use virtual computing, network and data storage resources on an as-needed basis, with the flexibility to scale these resources based on their needs at any given time. Qualifying businesses who intend to use the DAIR Cloud for development and testing need only submit a short application. Access to DAIR is granted for one-year, renewable terms. At the end of their DAIR term, most businesses migrate their product or service onto a commercial cloud.
Operationalizing their products on a commercial cloud is a significant challenge
For most SMEs, however, the cost uncertainty of operationalizing their products on a commercial cloud is a significant challenge. Depending on the commercial cloud provider, monthly costs will vary depending on requirements for compute power, storage, and network bandwidth. Using CloudTracker, SMEs can now monitor their projects’ cloud instances for resource utilization and generate historical usage reports. These easy-to-create reports can help to quickly forecast the equivalent costs of running their DAIR-hosted application(s) in a commercial cloud by applying commercial cloud prices. The CloudTracker helps provide a powerful basis to identify the commercial cloud provider whose pricing model best matches the SME’s unique product design and usage patterns.
“We’re excited about offering CloudTracker to the users of the DAIR Cloud,” said Tom Vitez, CANARIE’s Senior Director, Technology Innovation. “We’re hopeful that giving SMEs access to core cloud metrics will help them make the best design and deployment decisions for their business.”
More than 900 businesses across a range of industries have already taken advantage of CANARIE’s DAIR Cloud, which is free to use by Canadian startups and small businesses that have fewer than 500 employees. CANARIE is thankful for its collaboration with Cybera to power DAIR. CloudTracker is available today.
To learn more or to apply to use DAIR, visit canarie.ca/cloud/businesses.
