Moving to the cloud often comes with the promise of cost savings and operational efficiency: Move your application to the cloud instantly and save tons of money. However, the journey between on-premises and the cloud involves important decisions, troubleshooting, and delays. Without a well-planned strategy and understanding of all the expenses involved, you may have added cloud migration costs and a strain on your operational resources.
Lift & Shift without Due Diligence
The "lift and shift" approach, which seems like a quick and effortless way to transfer your existing architecture and applications to the cloud, can be deceiving. Lift and shift seemingly come with the promise that you will directly transfer your existing architecture and applications to the cloud with no hard work. Easy and done. However, this simplistic approach can create chaos if it is not done with careful planning and consideration of infrastructure and application needs. Beyond that, keeping a budget in mind also influences the lift-and-shift approach.
Factors Affecting Cloud Migration Costs
While the primary objective of cloud migration often centers around cutting costs, there are many ways that a poorly planned or executed cloud migration can actually increase your overall costs. For this reason, it is important to consider all potential cloud migration costs and ensure that you have the right solutions - and team - on your side before beginning your cloud migration.
Assessment and Planning Costs
Before you move anything to the cloud, a migration strategy starts with assessing your current infrastructure and applications and planning for the migration. At this early stage, you will need to evaluate which existing applications and data are best suited for the cloud. You will also need to evaluate your existing infrastructure for cloud readiness.
Without the proper knowledge or skills, this assessment stage can be lengthy and cost-intensive. Even more costly is making decisions without knowing all available options and having to re-evaluate your plan once the migration has started. Making uninformed decisions can lead to downtime and data loss, further contributing to the overall cloud migration costs.
DuploCloud Support
DuploCloud provides a comprehensive first stage of migration called Discovery. During this stage, we partner with you to assess your current infrastructure and applications and ensure that you are cloud ready. And if you are not quite there, we provide you with the steps needed to make your cloud migration a success. The support of a team with decades of experience in cloud migrations ensures that you have the most cost-effective and efficient solution.
Infrastructure Selection
Once you’ve assessed your needs, you can select the cloud provider that best meets these needs. Major cloud providers, like AWS, GCP, and Azure, all come with branded cloud services. They also come with their own pricing structures, ranging from free to based on time to based on compute power used.
These cloud providers also have storage options and network resources to consider. Along with these basic services, each has additional specialized cloud services including serverless options, database tools, and containerization support. Choosing the right cloud provider means navigating all of these options and matching them to your specific business needs.
DuploCloud Support
This is another area where DuploCloud offers a wealth of experience and support. Leveraging the insights from the Discovery phase, your dedicated team helps you select the cloud platform that will best suit your needs and provide you with the most cost-effective solution. And having someone who can make the right decisions the first time, saves both time and money in your overall cloud migration budget.
Security and Compliance
When planning your infrastructure, security and compliance should be a top priority in your migration strategy. This includes ensuring that the storage and services you choose meet all required standards of your industry. Data breaches can be costly to fix and even more costly in the event they lead to legal issues. Data breaches during a migration can occur when you have not planned for the secure migration of your existing data.
DuploCloud Support
During DuploCloud’s Setup and Training stage, we work with you to ensure that all of your security permissions and compliance needs are covered. We will ensure that the setup of your cloud environment accounts for all of your specific compliance requirements. This is another area where a partnership with DuploCloud can save in both the planning and implementation phases as you can rely on our extensive knowledge of security provisioning before your migration ever begins.
Existing Engineering Team
Suppose your existing IT team has extensive experience with your on-premises infrastructure and is learning cloud through experience. In that case, you may have additional needs in training your existing team or outsourcing labor for specialized tasks.
DuploCloud Support
DuploCloud’s Setup and Training stage provides you with comprehensive support and training to ensure that you not only know how your infrastructure is set up, but you are well positioned to monitor it via the DuploCloud platform. Additionally, our Post-Migration support provides continuous support, lessening the need for an internal team of cloud experts.
Migration with a Plan
The key to any cloud migration is to ensure you achieve your goals. You may start with a goal to save costs or intend to increase your security capabilities. However, without specialized knowledge to support your individual goals, you may incur additional costs rather than saving. And these issues can multiply if you proceed with errors in a cloud migration.
Partnering with DuploCloud for your cloud migration provides a one-stop platform for monitoring your application with an experienced team to provide support before, during, and after the migration. Both the platform and the team are part of DuploCloud’s annual service fees and ensure you meet your budget goals for your cloud migration. To learn more about saving money, visit our DevOps Calculator.
