Want to move to the cloud but not sure of the cost? You’re not alone on this journey!

While moving to the cloud is imperative for businesses to stay competitive in the current scenario and take advantage of enhanced agility, greater scalability, improved resource utilization, and cost reduction that the cloud offers, it is not as easy as it looks.

In the pursuit of saving costs, enterprises often spend more on their cloud migration journey because they fail to assess the cost of migration. Additionally, it brings multiple challenges along the journey like:

• Securing data and applications
• Keeping a close tab on infrastructure/operations costs
• Putting “right” governance in place
• Moving away from the mind-set of on-premises infrastructure
• Keeping up with the pace of ever-evolving cloud technologies

If not addressed in time, these challenges and lack of proper cost assessment might soon make the cloud architecture more complex, costly, less performant, operational overhead, and less secured.

But how do you address these challenges?

#1 Spend on a professional readiness assessment

In a rush to move to the cloud, enterprises often overlook the fact that they do not have a migration roadmap. They overlook the need to have a professional assessment and consider it an unnecessary additional expense. In the process, they miss the fact that cloud readiness assessment enables a smooth transition and provides substantial ROI.

A cloud migration readiness assessment takes various factors of migration into account that influences the costs, like infrastructure costs, migration, and post-migration costs.

Cloud infrastructure cost is one of the biggest factors that influence your cost of migration. Data usage, business applications and systems, network, database, and storage capacity, etc. are some factors that determine your cost of migration. Once you assess the infrastructure you need in the cloud, you can use the TCO calculator offered by cloud service providers like AWS that consider factors like server type, number of VMs, memory, etc., to determine the cloud infrastructure cost.

#2 Migrate resources strategically

One of the greatest advantages of the cloud is you pay for only what you use. Therefore, it is necessary to identify resources that need to be online 24×7 and resources that are scarcely used. Categorize resources based on their usage to automate start-up and shut down of the cloud resource. An assessment report can help you check the CPU and memory utilization of each resource to decide which resources need to be migrated to the cloud and which can be retained on-premise, thereby saving the cost of replicating underutilized resources on the cloud.

The cost of migration largely depends on the strategy you choose. Depending on whether you choose to lift and shift, rearchitect, re-platform, re-purchase, or retire, the cost will vary. You’ll also need to consider the time you’d need to migrate, provision for any purchase that you’d make, and additional help that you’ll need to hire, all of which would push your migration cost higher.

#3 Have an effective backup retention and storage plan

How often have you kept a file on your system thinking to delete it later and forgot? Though it doesn’t cost us anything except disk space, storage comes with a cost in the cloud. Therefore, it is important to have a comprehensive assessment to identify the files and applications that need to be replicated if they need a backup, and how long? Having detailed backup retention and storage plan can help enterprises avoid unnecessary storage costs in the cloud.

Enterprises also need to consider the cost of maintaining the applications in the cloud after migration. Having a team to monitor, systems and apps required to function post-migration add to the total migration cost.

Once you weigh in the various factors and cost, you’d need to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) to decide whether it is prudent to move to the cloud. If the costs you’re currently incurring are less than the costs you would incur in moving to the cloud, the cloud migration will be beneficial, and you would be able to reap the benefits that the cloud has to offer.