Avoiding Budget Exceeding During Cloud Migration
The stepping stone to digital transformation starts with the adoption of cloud technology. There is hardly any sector where digital technology has had its impact. The digital boom has resulted in increased customer demands and expectations. To keep up pace with this trend, businesses whether small or large are moving to the cloud.
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration refers to moving your existing workloads based on an on-premise infrastructure to the virtualized cloud environment. Cloud migration can also be between one cloud platform to another which is known as cloud-to-cloud migration.
The benefits of migrating to the cloud are many like the scalability of the workspace, better cost savings, enhanced performance, etc. More and more enterprises are now migrating to the cloud. But halfway into the migration process, many enterprises need to revoke the budget they initially allocated due to unexpected circumstances.
Optimizing and executing the migration process as per the initially planned strategy is imperative to ensure that you don’t find yourself in troubled waters. Let us see how an organization can pave the way for a successful economic migration to the cloud.
Expenditures Associated With Cloud Migration
Though migrating to the cloud is less expensive and enables better workspace management in terms of scalability, security compliance, etc, it does incur costs. Adopting the cloud includes phases like planning, migration, and management. The migration process to the cloud environment incurs some initial expenses associated with configuring your systems and environment for the migration, equipping your workforce to adapt to the new environment by giving them hands-on training sessions, etc.
According to a report by Forrester, labor costs can make up 50% of the migration costs. The cloud management phase is a continuous and ongoing process that includes continuous monitoring, remote repairs, troubleshooting, etc, and incurs expenses as long as you avail of cloud services.
Moving your workspace to the cloud includes moving your data and applications. So apart from the migration costs, there are some costs known as the pre-migration cost and post-migration costs. Pre-migration costs are associated with the physical on-premise infrastructure and include costs associated with retired or redundant hardware and servers, electricity, software licenses, labor, etc.
Post-migration costs include the expenses associated with applications that are migrated to the cloud. Post-migration costs include expenses associated with managing your cloud services like monitoring, maintenance, etc.
Types of Cloud Migration
According to DevOps.com, there are two types of cloud migration. The first one is a mere lift and shift which does not incur many expenses and is relatively easy. The second type of migration is rereplatform or rearchitecture migration. The rearchitecture migration enables better scalability and optimization. This migration, as compared to lift and shift migration is more expensive and is a time-consuming process.
Estimating The Cost Of Migration
You can calculate the cost estimates that are associated with cloud migration and optimize it by using software that uses tools like big data analytics to enable you to better analyze and budget your migration process. Some of the commonly used tools for this purpose are the AWS pricing calculator, Google cloud platform pricing calculator, and Microsoft Azure pricing calculator.
There are tools based on AWS, Google, and Azure that help you to estimate the cost difference between your existing on-premise infrastructure and the cloud model that you are going to opt for. These tools also help you to evaluate the impact of scaling your existing infrastructure before the migration.
Cost Optimization Strategies For Cloud Migration
Cloud migration costs can be optimized to an extent by ensuring that you do follow these strategies.
1) Choosing the Migration Service Provider
Choosing the right and trustworthy service provider is very important. The migration partner or service provider should have a reasonably good track record and experience. Of course, they may be charging you a lump sum amount. But it is indeed a worthy investment. A good migration partner has the best in class and industry-proven mechanisms that ensure your migration and the cloud management process don’t go off the rails.
2) Identify Hidden Costs
You should estimate and budget the indirect costs that are associated with cloud migration as these costs often go unnoticed. Indirect costs are associated with changes to the existing operations and procedures, costs to reskill your workforce, etc. Costs are also associated with respect to vacated room spaces, unused hardware, software that have become operational prior to the expiry of the license, etc.
3) Migrate Based on Application Assessment
It is very important that you analyze the applications based on your current environment before carrying out the migration process. This helps you to exactly understand the migration type and approach to be employed for your workloads. This also helps your existing applications and workloads to be easily configured to the new environment thereby ensuring better compatibility.
4) Better Tracking and Monitoring of the Operations
As the cloud services are based on a ‘pay-as-you-go basis, you might want the number of your traffic loads to be kept as optimal as possible, which might be in stark contrast with reality. The amount of data traffic through the cloud is much more than your estimates and so is the billing. Using industry-proven tools and mechanisms helps you to monitor your cloud usage and analyze the traffic. Rightsizing tools like Amazon CloudWatch enable you to track your usage.
Closing Note
Adopting the cloud has become a matter of existence for organizations. You cannot simply sit and worry about costs and belate the cloud transformation process. A better roadmap to the adoption and migration process can indeed help you to cut down the migration costs. A good approach to budget analysis and estimation can enable you to not only save migration costs but also embrace the cloud and thus strive towards the goal of digital transformation.
If you are thinking about migrating to the cloud, we at Activelobby can help you with the cloud migration process. Migration is not merely a simple lift-and-shift operation. We can define your cloud roadmap and thereby help you with planning and executing your migration to the cloud. Our cloud management services help you to monitor your cloud usage and thereby control your billing. We help you to migrate your resource-constrained applications and data to the platform you want.
We have accomplished a hundred-plus migration to date. Our service enables you to quickly and smoothly transit to the cloud without disrupting your operations and offers enhanced security compliance due to our DevSecOps practices. Our disaster management services ensure the safe upkeep of your data. To learn more about our migration stories, do visit our website.
