https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/How-to-calculate-cloud-migration-costs-before-you-move
Migrating to the cloud has the potential to save money by, for example, enabling businesses to take advantage of pricing models that require paying only for what they use. But the process of moving workloads to the cloud comes with its own costs, and if those costs are too steep, they can undercut the financial value that the favorable pricing delivers.
That's why it's critical to estimate cloud migration costs before you begin moving to the cloud. This article explains the costs organizations commonly incur when they move to the cloud and offers tips on how to estimate costs ahead of time and best practices for minimizing the total cost of cloud migration.
For simple cloud migrations -- such as those that involve a lift and shift of existing workloads into the cloud with few changes -- the cost of planning and completing a cloud migration might be minimal. But the more changes you plan to make to your workloads as part of the migration and the more complex your migration plans are, the higher you can expect your costs to be due to factors such as the following.
Some applications can move to the cloud with virtually no changes. However, to maximize capabilities like scalability and security, organizations sometimes choose to update, refactor or entirely rewrite applications prior to moving them to the cloud. These changes require work by software developers, which comes at a cost.
Migrating to the cloud might require training employees in cloud administration, observability and security practices.
Depending on your level of in-house cloud expertise, you might decide to work with a consulting company that specializes in planning and managing cloud migrations.
Although cloud data storage can be more reliable than on-premises storage, you should still back up cloud-based data, either by copying it to on-premises storage or to another cloud region or cloud. Or you could copy it to multiple locations for even more assurance against data loss.
Migrating to the cloud might involve buying additional software tools or platforms, such as cloud migration software or monitoring tools that can help validate that your workloads are performing adequately after you've moved them to the cloud.
In some cases, migrating to the cloud requires purchasing new software licenses for workloads. For example, if the terms of your on-premises OS licenses don't allow you to repurpose the licenses for cloud-based workloads, you'll have to buy new ones.
You can move data over the network into a public cloud for free in most cases. But, if you have an exceptionally large volume of data to migrate, the network might be insufficient for the task because it would take too long. In that case, you might opt for a service that moves data in petabyte-size increments on storage media carried by trucks.
Pricing for these services is not publicly available, but expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars and possibly much more.
Migrating to the cloud can require changes to your compliance operations. For example, you might need to collect new types of evidence to demonstrate that your cloud-based workloads comply with whichever regulations your organization needs to meet. These changes can come at a price due to the need to invest in additional compliance tooling or hire compliance officers or consultants with expertise in the cloud.
To complicate matters further, monitoring and managing the cloud migration costs described above can be challenging for several reasons:
In short, it's challenging to predict, monitor or optimize the cost of cloud migration. And, to the extent that you can do these things, they require manual effort, and the insights they generate are of limited accuracy.
While migrating to the cloud comes at a cost, keeping workloads on-premises can be costly, too. That's especially true if your on-premises environment is subject to the following challenges:
By assessing how much your business pays for on-premises costs like these, you can estimate the total cost of keeping workloads on-premises. From there, you're in a good position to determine whether the money you'll potentially save by moving to the cloud is greater than the cost of performing the migration.
To make that determination, you also need to know how much cloud migration will cost you. As noted above, producing a close enough estimate is challenging because there are so many cost variables to weigh and plans often change once a migration is underway.
But, in general, you can calculate cloud migration costs using the following steps.
First, determine which workloads to migrate to the cloud. You might be moving every workload into the cloud and abandoning the on-premises environment entirely. But you might also elect to keep some workloads on-premises.
Once you know which workloads you will migrate, determine whether and how you'll change the workloads as part of the migration project. For example, will you refactor any applications so they can run as microservices and scale more efficiently in a cloud environment? Will you need to build new security features, such as additional authentication controls, into your apps?
After you've determined which application changes are necessary, estimate how much time and effort it will take on the part of software developers to implement those changes. A precise estimate is virtually impossible because it's difficult to know exactly how long application updates will take until the work is complete, but you can establish a basic estimate.
You can then translate estimated developer hours into a cost estimate based on how much your business pays for software developers.
In addition to estimating software development costs, determine whether you'll incur any data migration costs. Again, cloud providers don't usually charge fees to move data into their clouds, although they do charge egress fees to move it out. But, if you have large amounts of data to migrate, you might need to pay for specialized data transfer services.
The migration might require buying new software licenses or tools. These can include tools for helping plan and perform the migration itself. They might also include new licenses to support cloud-based workloads.
If in-house IT staff lack the expertise to perform a cloud migration on their own or will need training to administer the cloud effectively, you need to research the costs of consulting and training services.
As mentioned above, you might not be able to get an accurate cost estimate because third-party cloud migration service providers who charge hourly are unlikely to be able to say precisely how many hours they'll spend on your project. But most can provide a general guideline.
There is no simple solution for minimizing cloud migration costs, but here are methods that can help:
Chris Tozzi is a freelance writer, research adviser, and professor of IT and society. He has previously worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator.
12 Dec 2024