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?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse on-premises baseline costs (facility, hardware, staff) with cloud consumption costs — candidates often pick an on-premises cost because it is a real expense, but the question asks what belongs 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 TCO assessments focus on the operational expenses the customer pays to the cloud provider — compute, storage, networking, and managed service fees — because these replace the capital and operational costs of on-premises infrastructure. Compute and storage usage fees are the recurring cloud charges that directly substitute for owned hardware and self-managed facilities. Including them is essential to compare the true ongoing cost of the cloud model against the data center baseline.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
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.
- ✗
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.
- ✗
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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Private Service Connect and Private Access
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.
Key term
Baseline
A baseline is a documented starting point for the normal performance and behavior of a system, network, or component, used to detect changes and troubleshoot issues.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
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.