Question

Difficulty: MediumAzure Pricing Calculator and TCO Calculator

A university is preparing a budget proposal to migrate its student registration portal from its local university-owned server room to Microsoft Azure. To justify the migration, the finance team needs to estimate the potential cost savings over a five-year period by comparing on-premises operational expenses—including server virtualization software licenses and IT labor—against running equivalent workloads in the cloud. Which tool should the university use to perform this comparison?

  1. A
    Azure Pricing Calculator
  2. Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) CalculatorAnswer
  3. C
    Azure Cost Management + Billing
  4. D
    Azure Advisor

Answer

Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
The correct tool is the Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator because it is designed to build a comparison report between existing on-premises server room workloads (including licensing, labor, and facilities costs) and equivalent Azure resources over a multi-year period to estimate potential savings.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary business objective.
The objective is to compare on-premises infrastructure costs (including labor and licensing) against Azure cloud costs to estimate five-year savings.
This determines whether the tool needs to evaluate current on-premises assets or future cloud resources.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of the available Azure cost tools.
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator ingests on-premises variables (hardware, software, electricity, labor) and generates a comparative savings report, whereas the Pricing Calculator only estimates cloud service costs.
Matching the scenario requirements (comparing on-premises to cloud) to the specific tool purpose identifies the correct choice.

Key Concept

Azure Pricing Calculator vs. TCO Calculator
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