The cloud migration is an incredible solution for most businesses in various sizes. Indeed, the benefits can bring such a huge change in your company. But when you propose this new change to your upper lines, they will want to know how much cloud migration costs.
As a person in charge, this question can be hard for you to answer because cloud migration is not a generic solution for all companies. Each company has different variables and needs in regards to the cloud migration services. Therefore, we’d expect the different prices for different business scales and solutions.
You will need to calculate the direct and indirect costs. Well, we cannot put the blame on the upper lines because the costs can directly impact on the employees and company overall. So, you will need to present them the trustworthy numbers. Here are the things you can do to get the best estimation.
Auditing the IT infrastructure overall costs
It can’t be easy to audit the current IT operations. But it is a necessary measure to estimate the cost of cloud migration for your company. Auditing is an important task to understand the real scale of your IT infrastructure. Only be then, you will be able to calculate the potential cost of the cloud services and resources.
The direct costs would include the maintenance contracts, software licenses, physical servers, warranties, insurances, spare parts, supplies, materials, and any other else that your company can pay directly. Retrieving such kind of information might require your level of authority. But if you are the person in charge, I assume you are able to pull the invoices, orders, and records from every department. It can be easier to calculate the direct costs.
The cost of this ownership is one of the keys to estimate the overall cloud infrastructure costs.
The other direct costs have things to do with the operational costs such as maintenance, IT staff, internet service provider, space costs, and other relevant costs.
Meanwhile, the indirect costs are the expenses that you need to know when your current IT infrastructure goes down. During the downtime, there was company’s loss. You will want to estimate how much the company’s lost during that time.
Cloud Infrastructure estimation
It is a must to calculate your current IT infrastructure costs. Only by then, you will be able to compare them with the cloud infrastructure costs. The potential costs of the cloud infrastructure can go side-by-side with the on-premise once you’ve finished retrieving the overall possible costs.
That means you need to finish your audit first so that you will get a better understanding of the cloud pricing. The good thing here is that you can get estimation much quicker than auditing your on-premise infrastructure. It is because most of the cloud companies offer cloud pricing information to their clients with enormous transparency.
Some of the providers even come with an in-depth monthly cost calculator so that you can easily compare it with your on-premise cost estimation.
Each cloud service provider comes with a different pricing calculator. For instance, Amazon Web Services come with a Total Cost of Ownership Calculator. Google comes with Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator.
Cloud migration costs
Moving IT infrastructure and operations can come with different costs. Depending on how much you will plan on moving, the migration process can cost an enormous amount of money and resources in your company.
From on-premise servers to the cloud, the careful data moving costs are not a small deal.
Not to mention that you will need to measure the possible networking costs involving when you migrate the data.
All cloud providers might charge you for transferring the data to their systems. The transfers are not done overnight. In some cases, it requires some phrases to finish to migrate the data.
During the cloud migration, there’s a possibility that your company will use the current on-premise applications. So, there will be time, resources, and money involved in this activity and you will need to estimate them well before proceeding.
To ensure the data integrity, the cloud providers will work around the clock to ensure the governance and security. There will be the labor and money granted on making sure that the data is in sync between on-premises and cloud environments.
The integration and testing of the apps will also cost you some fortune. So, you will need to consider them too.
The other fees to consider during migration is the consultant fees. Cloud migration is not an easy process. The average folks won’t know for sure without the help of experts and professionals on this.
You need the help of cloud experts to understand the scopes and scales of your companies. They’re the ones who can help you to find out the gaps and rooms for improvements. You will need to estimate the costs of these experts based on the level of difficulties when you need the help most.
The post-migration costs
After the migration process is done, it won’t end right there. There is also a cost to pay after the cloud migration is finished.
One thing for sure, monthly cloud service comes as the first and foremost element.
Then you will need to estimate the direct and indirect costs in your new cloud environment.
There are costs to consider such as apps integration, app demonstration and testing, labor, training your team, security service, maintenance service, licenses, and many more. Make sure to list them all.
These should focus on the costs after the cloud migration. Of course, this will also depend on the type of the service you choose.
Consider the costs against the benefits
Your upper lines might ask you the question “Is it worth our money?”. Well, of course, you don’t want to bring up the presentation without pitching the benefits to them.
Cloud services, in the most cases, are much more affordable than on-premise infrastructure. If the companies are striving for expansions, the cloud services will make greater choices for all reasons. But it is important to find out the root reason of cloud migration.
First things first, what is the real reason you want to move on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud one?
Cloud service is definitely faster, ampler, and more reliable. If you want to be a part of Industry 4.0, you must migrate your company to the cloud as soon as possible. The reliable cloud services can provide you with scalability as well. So, whenever you need more resources, you can rely on them. But again, is your company ready to embrace it?
