You ask your team to perform an up-front and on-going cost comparison with the following assumptions:
the purchase cost of one physical server is $14,000
the leasing cost of one virtual server from a cloud provider is $2,000 per month
the on-premise physical server and the leased virtual server can each support 8,000 concurrent users
to support the maximum number of predicted concurrent users, three servers will be required
Based on these assumptions and based on approximate usage values from the preceding graph, the estimated concurrent usage over an average 24 hour period results in the following values for the number of virtual severs required:
10 hours with 1 virtual server
4 hours with 2 virtual servers
10 hours with 3 virtual servers