How Much Does Cloud Migration Cost?
Find out what you’ll pay (and what you’ll save) as you bring your business to the cloud.
Moving your organization’s infrastructure to the cloud leads to more flexibility, scalability, and many more benefits. However, it cannot be done for free — at least not at anything close to the scale most enterprises require to keep doing business. Thus, it’s essential to start considering cloud migration costs early in the process of moving from on-premises hardware to cloud solutions managed by third parties.
With 60% of all corporate data now stored in the cloud, the earlier you start planning out how your enterprise will join this new way of doing business the better. You can make sure your business is as prepared as possible by laying out the potential costs and savings of its upcoming transition ahead of time. Here’s how to start estimating cloud migration costs for your company.
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What cloud migration costs should I expect for my business?
Savings against on-premises solutions
Online tools for estimating cloud migration costs
Make your business more efficient with DevOps-as-a-Service
What cloud migration costs should I expect for my business?
You’re likely already considering the expense of your potential new cloud-based service itself. However, several other categories of expenses and savings are just as important to scrutinize when proactively accounting for cloud migration costs and how they may affect your business. Here’s a broader look at what kinds of financial impacts you should keep in mind as you prepare your business to move to the cloud.
Savings against on-premises solutions
This may sound counterintuitive, but you aren’t getting a complete picture of your cloud migration costs if you aren’t considering how simplifying your current on-premises solution will contribute to that bottom line. For example, even if you already own your own server racks, they aren’t a one-time expense. They require space to house, as well as a broader support operation complete with utilities, maintenance, and security, all of which requires substantial expenses even after the up-front cost of their installation. Moving to the cloud removes those expenses, and you should count that savings against cloud migration costs to arrive at the most accurate possible estimate.
Refactoring costs
Depending on your business’ current software setup, the transition to working on cloud services may be simple or more complicated. For instance, if your company currently uses common software running in virtual machines across your internal network, it may not take much to get it up and running on the cloud. On the other hand, if your company uses bespoke solutions across numerous different networks and architectures, you may need to invest a substantial amount of time and money into preparing it for work on a cloud service.
One powerful way to cut down on the delay for re-deploying applications is with a no-code/low-code DevOps platform, such as that offered by DuploCloud. This approach has the benefit of keeping your business focused on generating value rather than mitigating the potentially disruptive effects of cloud migration all on its own.
Cloud environment costs
Popular cloud service providers offer numerous different plans built to cater to businesses at every level, with prices broken down by terabyte storage, data requests by the thousands, and more. Arriving at a final figure will require accounting for exactly what your business needs, but fortunately you don’t have to work through every piece of the puzzle on your own.
Ready to take the next step? Our free ebook will walk you through everything you need for your own cloud migration. Read it now:
Online tools for estimating cloud migration costs
The average total for cloud migration costs can range from $5,000 for smaller workloads all the way up to $500,000 and beyond for larger tasks. In order to arrive at a more accurate estimate, you can use tools from major cloud service providers that let you select your choice of services, feed in your requirements, and immediately begin estimating cloud migration costs.
Here is some more information about Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s respective tools for estimating cloud migration costs.
- Amazon Web Services: The AWS Pricing Calculator is built to offer transparent pricing calculations for new customers as well as current customers who are considering changing their service selection. It allows you to search for the most cost-effective instances based on your use cases, and it also allows you to compare costs based on region. Its interface can be a little overwhelming if you aren’t immediately sure what you need, but it’s a powerful tool nonetheless.
- Microsoft Azure: The Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator breaks down its services into a series of categories to help you find what you require — and if you prefer to have a base to work from, it also cleverly includes a list of easy-to-understand example scenarios you can then customize. Saving multiple estimates at once allows users to compare multiple possible approaches before pursuing a plan with Microsoft.
- Google Cloud: The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is sorted by product, so it will be helpful to know exactly what kind of architecture you need to run your business services ahead of time. As you’d expect from Google, the entire database is deeply searchable, with an up-to-date pricing estimate displayed alongside your current selections.
Take the results from your service of choice together with your on-premises savings and refactoring costs together to arrive at a final estimate for cloud migration costs.
Make your business more efficient with DevOps-as-a-Service
Transferring your working environment to the cloud is a sound decision for most businesses, but it can also present a logistical hurdle — especially if you don’t already have enough DevOps resources to make sure each part of the process runs smoothly.
Fortunately, you don’t have to hire new team members or search for expensive contractors just to create the tools you need when you need them. Read our white paper on how low-code/no-code DevOps software can help you automate and deploy applications ten times faster to find out more. We’re pleased to offer a fast, easy, and powerful new approach to creating cloud applications of all sizes.
