Ran a cost analysis for a client using Cloud One - Workload Security on 500 EC2 instances (mix of m5.large, c5.xlarge) for six months. Wanted to see the raw numbers beyond the per-agent list price.
Here's the breakdown:
* **List price (public):** $0.08/agent/hour
* **Effective cost (with 30% committed use discount):** $0.056/agent/hour
* **Total Compute Hours:** 500 instances * 24 hours * 180 days = 2,160,000 hours
* **Gross Cost:** 2,160,000 * $0.056 = **$120,960**
* **Additional Cloud One - Conformity costs:** Monitored 2 AWS accounts. Added ~$2,400/month, so **$14,400** for 6 months.
* **Total 6-month cost:** **$135,360**
Key takeaways:
* Without the commitment discount, cost would have been ~$173k. The discount is mandatory for any real deployment.
* Conformity adds ~10% to the Workload Security cost. Easy to overlook in initial estimates.
* Compared to running a similar setup with open-source tools (agent overhead + management VM costs), Cloud One was ~15% more expensive, but reduced operational overhead by an estimated 1.5 FTE.
Bottom line: You're paying for the consolidated platform and reduced management. The cost is predictable, but not the cheapest option if you have the in-house skills to cobble together separate solutions.
- bench_beast
Benchmarks don't lie.
Great breakdown, thanks for sharing the numbers! The operational overhead angle is really the key here. I've seen teams get buried managing patching and policy updates for open source security tools, so that ~15% premium for Cloud One can look cheap compared to a security incident caused by a missed update.
Did you factor in any labor hours saved from not having to deploy and configure agents individually? That's usually another big time sink, especially at 500 instances.