Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business Practice Question
A company is evaluating total cost of ownership (TCO) for moving its on-premises data center to Google Cloud. Which of the following costs should they include in the cloud TCO assessment?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Compute and storage usage fees
Cloud costs include compute, storage, network egress, and managed service fees. On-premises costs like hardware, power, and cooling are avoided, so they are not part of cloud TCO.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Data center facility rent and power
Why it's wrong here
Data center facility rent and power are legacy on-premises expenses that the public cloud eliminates; the cloud provider bundles facility, cooling, and electricity costs into the price of its services. Therefore, these items appear only in the on-premises baseline for a TCO comparison, not as a separate charge on a cloud bill, and they do not belong in cloud TCO.
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Hardware purchase and maintenance costs
Why it's wrong here
Hardware purchase and maintenance costs are capital expenditures in an on-prem environment, covering servers, storage arrays, networking gear, and vendor support contracts. In a public cloud, these assets are virtualized and operated by the provider, so the customer no longer owns or sustains physical infrastructure; thus these costs are replaced entirely by operational usage fees and should not be included in cloud TCO.
- ✓
Compute and storage usage fees
Why this is correct
Cloud TCO is built around pay-as-you-go fees for compute instances, managed storage like Cloud Storage volumes, and related services such as network egress or load balancing. These usage-based charges are direct line items on the cloud invoice and represent the actual cost of running workloads, so they are the core component of cloud TCO calculations. Sizing, region, and committed-use discounts all affect these fees.
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Employee salaries for data center staff
Why it's wrong here
Employee salaries for data center staff are organizational labor costs, not expenses charged by the cloud provider; cloud invoices never include personnel line items. While moving to cloud often reduces headcount for hardware maintenance and facilities management, any remaining staff costs are treated as separate transition or retained operations expenses. Consequently, these salaries fall outside cloud TCO as a direct fee, though they may appear in a full ownership analysis.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
Key term
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the GCDL exam.