6 Ways Cloud Migration Can Cost You Money
Infrastructure and operations professionals who are under pressure to move fast to the public cloud are prone to a number of classic cost blunders. Even as businesses embrace the numerous benefits of cloud computing, controlling the cost of cloud computing remains an issue.
Here are the six most typical faults that cause cloud migration expenses to spiral out of control, as well as the steps I&O executives should take to budget correctly for cloud migrations:
1. Hiring the Wrong Team
An important component of a cloud migration plan is the selection of a migration partner.
Nonetheless, many choose a migration partner based on familiarity or inexpensive cost rather than experience. Others attempt to reduce partnership expenses by delegating the relocation project to an internal team, even if they are not prepared. Both of these options frequently result in errors and rework, which raises overall expenses.
2. Wrong Focus
Under time constraints, infrastructure and operations professionals frequently favour the "lift and shift" method of shifting workloads to the cloud without altering them.
However, for many on-premises apps, the wisest step for the organization may be to do nothing at all. The best course of action may be to rebuild and re-release a program in a cloud-native manner, or perhaps to completely replace it with a SaaS-based replacement.
Taking a rehosting approach too quickly and deferring the cost of modernizing or replacing critical applications can result in higher cloud operating costs after migration.
3. Rushed Application Assessments
Application evaluation is the most important early stage in a cloud migration project since it determines which cloud migration strategy should be utilized for each application. A typical problem is failing to adequately analyse the workloads to be migrated, which results in an inadequate specification of migration requirements and downstream scope creep.
If possible, I&O executives should request that their migration vendor provide an initial cost estimate at the outset of the project, but then give a revised statement of work and final pricing once the application evaluation phase is completed.
4. Wrong Landing Zone Design
Inadequately architecting and implementing the underlying cloud "landing zone" environments into which workloads are transferred might raise security and compliance expenses. Designing account structures, federation to identity directories, virtual private cloud (VPC) networking, role-based access control (RBAC) roles and rule sets, and infrastructure for monitoring, security, and configuration management should all be part of the landing zone setup.
Ensure that the establishment of these environments is anticipated and included in the scope of work well in advance of the migration.
5. Not Accounting For Dependencies
Another possible issue that is typically the result of insufficient application assessment is the discovery of dependency bottlenecks. Failure to identify and account for interdependencies between on-premises systems being moved can lead to incorrect application migration grouping and ordering, network performance issues, and cascading delays. This might cause migrations to take longer than intended, increasing costs.
You must include dependencies as part of the application review process to maintain desired migration timelines.
6. Indirect Costs
When planning for a cloud migration, CIOs sometimes overlook indirect project expenses, such as the price of converting their organization to function efficiently in the public cloud or the residual (sunk) costs of vacated data center capacity. These expenses are usually unavoidable, but they must be factored into the overall cloud migration budget.
The cost of reskilling current teams, raising compensation to market levels for cloud positions, changes to organizational structure and operating procedures, and adopting agile DevOps principles across the IT organization are all transformation expenses to keep an eye on. The most common residual expenses of a cloud migration are productivity losses owing to unoccupied buildings and hardware, underutilized software licenses, or unproductive labour. It may also include the expense of running duplicate copies of the same system during the cutover time.
Having trouble with cloud migration? Our DevOps team of cloud specialists can help kickstart your migration through shared expertise, benchmarking information, and clear cloud strategy. Book a consultation with us today.