Figuring out how much public cloud migration costs isn’t an easy task. While some expenditures, such as the monthly expenses of server administration, are easy to predict, others are more difficult for businesses to anticipate. Whether it’s failing to identify additional migration charges, bandwidth fees, or onboarding expenses, it’s easy for your cloud migration costs to spiral.
To ensure you’re prepared for any potential outgoings, here are five hidden public cloud migration costs you need to know before you make the move, including:
- Azure pricing models
- Bandwidth and storage
- Migration cost
- Implementation roadmap
- Onboarding, training and upskilling your team
Azure pricing models
The pricing model for Azure migration varies depending on the specific services and features that are used. Azure offers a number of pricing options and discounts, including the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which allows customers to use their existing on-premises licences to reduce the cost of running workloads in Azure. There are also a number of tools and resources available to help customers understand and manage their expenses, including the Azure pricing calculator and the Azure Cost Management service.
Overall, the pricing model for Azure migration is flexible and scalable, and can be customised to suit the needs and budget of each customer. When starting your public cloud migration, you should minimise overhead Azure costs by implementing a phased migration approach.
To get the most value out of your public cloud investment, you should migrate business-critical applications and data in stages. By first moving non-critical applications, you will get a better understanding of Azure platform capabilities, and you’ll be able to identify the ways you’ll need to change your processes and train employees. When you move mission-critical applications, your team will already be used to the platform, and any potential issues will have been resolved.
Although Azure pricing costs vary from business to business, it’s critical during the early implementation process to minimise licensing fees. In order to do this, you can implement a phased migration strategy that will allow you to optimise storage and minimise overhead expenses.
Bandwidth and storage
One commonly overlooked area of public cloud migration cost is bandwidth and cloud storage.
Depending on the size of your solution, your organisation will have a set amount of cloud storage available. Although storing data in a public cloud is free, accessing information is chargeable, and you will need an appropriate bandwidth to retrieve it.
These additional charges can include:
- Data transfer from the public cloud to a personal device.
- Backing up, replicating and accessing virtual machines.
Depending on the size of your business, and the amount of data you plan on storing in the public cloud, connectivity, and storage costs can and will easily stack up.
To get a clear understanding of how much your public cloud migration could cost, request your free migration assessment today.
Migration cost
Depending on your migration strategy, there are different levels of associated costs. This is due to the expense of changing infrastructure, such as reconfiguring public cloud storage costs, networking, and computer resources, as well as application and workload fees, in order to move core processes into the cloud.
To minimise public cloud migration costs, a good provider will support you by implementing a phased approach and first creating a test platform. Following an in-depth migration assessment, trailing a proof of concept solution will ensure that your new public cloud platform is best supporting your business needs.
Next, non-business critical information and applications should be migrated into the public cloud. This will give you a deeper understanding into how your new cloud solution is going to be used, and the potential associated costs, such as:
- How many users are accessing your system at one time, and appropriate bandwidth needed.
- How users want to access data in the public cloud, and potential VPN and hardware solutions that will need to be implemented.
- Where users want to access data from, and the relevant bandwidth needed for secure and efficient home working.
This gradual implementation causes the least disruption to your business as you iron out potential hurdles that may arise. A phased implementation also gives you the time to run comprehensive training and upskilling programmes to ensure that all employees can fully leverage the benefits of the platform.
Top Tip
A phased implementation will give you time to run comprehensive training programmes to upskill your employees, while minimising potential risk associated with a ‘drag & drop’ approach.
Implementation roadmap
A well implemented public cloud system will not happen overnight. To manage key stakeholder expectations and minimise cloud migration costs, a good provider will support you in building an implementation roadmap with key deliverables at each stage. This includes:
- Identifying the predicted length of the project and estimating internal and external administration expenses.
- Potential push backs and risks of your new cloud platform and how to mitigate them.
Without an implementation roadmap, you could be running, and paying for, on-premise hardware and public cloud infrastructure simultaneously. If old systems and licences are renewed mid-migration, this significantly prolongs achieving a return on investment from your solution as, for example, if you renew your on site hardware for another five years, yet your roadmap indicates that you’ll be turning it off in two months time, the cost of running a public cloud system and on-site hardware side-by-side, will waste a significant amount of budget. In turn, this will make it harder to show the value of your project, and minimise your return on investment.
An accurate roadmap starts with an in-depth assessment of your current infrastructure and processes. Start your migration journey today by enquiring about your cloud migration assessment.
Onboarding, training and upskilling your team
Research shows that half of businesses who are migrating to a public cloud platform lack the appropriate skills internally, with a further quarter of companies facing user adoption challenges.
To maximise your investment, it’s important to budget for training to minimise potential disruption to your team or customers during this shift by ensuring they understand the new processes.
To lessen this disruption, a good partner will support you by:
- Distributing information on how core processes will change, such as two-factor authentication upon logging in, to minimise internal headaches.
- Creating workplace champions, including key stakeholders, noise makers and superusers, to buy into the new processes and support your team.
- Shadowing the IT team to give them a full education on your new public cloud system and how to navigate it.
- Curating a well architected review, informing you of areas in which your infrastructure can be altered, and supporting you after the migration process with cloud adoption training and support.
- Experts as an extension of your team. Cloud specialists provide the knowledge and expertise to bridge the gap whilst you upskill/skill your internal IT team.
So, how much will my public cloud migration cost?
Ultimately, there’s no one size fits all solution, and therefore no universal fee. Depending on your migration strategy, the upfront public cloud migration expenses can be significant without the correct planning, due to:
- Changing bandwidth and connectivity. In order to meet the demands of your new public cloud platform, your connectivity access may need a considerable upgrade to provide you with faster broadband.
- Onboarding new hardware. When undertaking a cloud migration project, one overlooked cost is hardware that supports cloud migration, such as updated servers, laptops and any business critical items that will need to be retired.
- Cloud migration support. Often businesses think they can migrate alone. Halfway through a project, however, it becomes clear that they need the assistance of a trusted public cloud migration partner to support their IT team.
- Testing phase. In order to ensure that your public cloud migration project runs smoothly, businesses should robustly trial potential cloud portals before they are live. This allows you to thoroughly plan and prepare your data and team for migration.
- The length of the project. Ultimately, the longer the cloud migration project takes, the longer the associated costs. It’s vital that businesses correctly plan and execute their cloud migration project swiftly and efficiently.
In order to get an accurate estimation of costs, you must undertake a cloud migration assessment with a trusted provider. A thorough assessment of your current internal processes, data structure, and systems will identify potential roadblocks and hidden expenses, such as the need for data restructuring to maximise efficiency and compatibility with a best-practice cloud infrastructure. This will help you make informed decisions about your investment and ensure that your cloud platform is future-proof and able to connect seamlessly with other systems.
A good cloud provider would, in fact, help your business make significant savings when migrating to the cloud, by using ‘like for like’ technology, and retiring outdated infrastructure and work paths.
Key takeaways
- There’s no one size fits all solution, and therefore no universal price for migration.
- Without considering Azure pricing models, bandwidth & storage, migration costs, onboarding your team, and following an implementation roadmap, costs can spiral.
- Phased implementation will help you minimise costs by maximising your system usage, as you upskill your employees and create the perfect infrastructure for your business.
- A good public cloud migration provider would help you avoid unnecessary cost and can actually help you make substantial IT savings.
Receive uncomplicated costs with your cloud migration assessment
Get in touch with a member of our team and receive a no-obligation cloud migration assessment with a breakdown of your potential expenses, timescales, and challenges.
*Source: Jefferson Frank
