3 Ways To Reduce Cloud Migration Cost
Cloud migration is a critical project that impacts the further prospects of a business. Many times the cost of migrating to the cloud often exceeds the worst estimates that are being made by a business.
Several costs are associated with moving to the cloud. During the execution of the migration project, an enterprise may be required to keep the on-premise infrastructure also intact as the degree and the extent of success of the cloud migration process cannot be taken for granted. Therefore an organization will be required to deal with the expenses related to both on-premise and cloud infrastructure.
What are the Costs Associated With Cloud Migration?
1) Costs Associated With Application
While moving from the on-premise solution to the cloud, a majority of the applications may require some conditioning as a mere lift and shift technique may not serve any purpose. A lift and shift or rehosting strategy is the simplest of all the migration strategies and hence consumes less cost overhead as compared to a migration approach based on refactoring that consumes a significantly larger cost overhead. The more conditioning an application needs, the larger will be the associated costs.
2) Costs Associated with Latency
Latency is an often-overlooked factor that presents some risks and hence potential cost overheads. Any failure in the migration strategy or a lack of adequate planning may pave the way to undesired latency and downtime. This can compromise the performance of those applications that require instantaneous responses. Even a delay of a few seconds is so critical that it can cause enormous loss to the business apart from the stake in reputation caused to the organization.
3) Cost Associated With Compromised Dependencies
An incomplete and hasty assessment of the applications that are based on the current infrastructure can lead to a failure in proper understanding and mapping of the various application dependencies. This can result in compromised application performance and other hiccups. It can further add up to burgeoning costs due to the application downtime and prolong the time taken for the successful completion of the migration.
4) Hidden Costs
There are several hidden costs associated while migrating to the cloud. These hidden sources of costs related to cloud migration include the cost of licenses associated with the software that is based on the on-premise infrastructure, that is not overdue, and is likely to become redundant. It also includes costs of hardware and other physical components based on the on-premise infrastructure that are likely to become redundant in the process of cloud migration. Other overheads include the cost required to reskill the teams and the changes that need to be made to the organizational structure.
How To Reduce the Cloud Migration Costs?
1) Right-Sizing
It is important to identify the performance requirements prior to selecting a cloud service provider. Understand your minimal and optimal performance requirements prior to choosing the cloud service provider. Adopting a one-size-fits-all strategy in which all the applications based on the on-premise infrastructure are merely lifted and shifted to the cloud may pose severe limitations. Hence it is of utmost importance to right-size the applications depending on their specifics while moving to the cloud. Right-sizing the cloud infrastructure can enable an enterprise to not only cut the additional costs overheads but also meet its requirements. An enterprise can provision its resources based on any variations in its requirements. As far as an on-premise infrastructure is concerned, scalability and provisioning are indeed a challenge.
2) Availing the Services of Managed Services Providers
Most of the cloud service providers offer dedicated managed solutions to organizations. Availing such services can help organizations to get around the need to go through the hassles of cloud management and cost optimization. Dedicated service providers can help an enterprise in planning their cloud migration roadmap and map their requirements to the cloud infrastructure. The services of managed services providers can help an enterprise to minimize the downtime associated with cloud migration and also ensure faster execution of the migration process. Most of these managed cloud service providers offer dedicated cloud monitoring solutions and tools that can enable organizations to gain visibility about the consumption of cloud resources.
3) Cloud Pricing Calculators
Cloud pricing calculators can help organizations estimate the costs of migrating to the cloud. Most of the major public cloud service providers offer such solutions as Google Cloud Pricing Calculator offered by Google Cloud, Azure Pricing Calculator by Azure, and AWS Pricing Calculator by AWS. These tools can help an organization to calculate their total cost of ownership while making the move to the cloud and the difference between the ownership costs associated with the on-premise solution and the cloud.
Conclusion
Cloud migration is not a cakewalk process that can be implemented in a fortnight. In fact, there are several costs associated with cloud migration. These could be due to applications, latency, configuration issues, etc. To get around the burgeoning cost overheads, an enterprise can consider availing the services of managed service providers or using pricing solutions offered by public cloud services like Google, AWS, etc.
If you are finding it a daunting task to control and manage your cloud costs, we provide you with our cloud-managed services. As part of our cloud managed services we offer platform management solutions, cloud resource monitoring solutions, troubleshooting services, remote repair solutions, etc. This can help you to keep your costs under check without compromising the performance.
