C8. Avoid creating the perception that on-premises services are "free"

For better or worse, the public cloud makes costs transparent. A service owner recently having migrated services to the public cloud may be surprised at the significant monthly operational expense associated with running something that was previously "free" from their perspective because they leveraged the value-adding infrastructure services of NI&S, UAS, CCS, or the On-premises Cloud, for the use of which DoIT teams typically did not pay an actual fee, but for which there was a very real cost, borne by the Division but externalized from the perspective of their unit. In fact, historical cost externalization is a legitimate point of resistance to public cloud adoption, stemming from units of the Division not properly funded to pay monthly for consumption-based computing services, relying instead on the capital expenses of other units and the organizational precedents that allowed the infrastructure purchased thereby to be used without charge. Changing these perceptions - that is - moving towards the normalization of a consumption-based model for computing - is properly within scope for the CIO office. From the perspective of a service owner reading this document, care should be taken to avoid offering services whose cost structure is sufficiently obscured from the customer to give the appearance of its being "free", thereby perpetuating the false belief that "free" is the cost baseline against which metered cloud services should be compared.