Hopping on to Azure Cloud infrastructure can be both, scary and exciting! The initial steps are always very crucial and planning your budget for cloud migration is a good place to start with. It helps you organize your procedures, estimate the expenses, and be ready for the big leap.
This blog helps you understand and identify various costs of moving from on-premise to cloud infrastructure.
Your current on-premise conditions primarily help determine the cost of your cloud migration. These conditions include your present infrastructure, workload integrations, cloud applications, the degree of virtualization of your functions, and the support you would need through the migration. For example, if you are using an infrastructure with numerous customization and significant dependency on your present infrastructure solution, it will take longer and more resources to migrate to the cloud infrastructure.
We can help you with the following steps to identify the cloud migration costs:
Assess your on-premise system thoroughly
Before moving from on-premises to cloud, you should take a close look at your existing infrastructure solution. It will not only help you ascertain costs involved in the migration process but also help you develop a blueprint of the infrastructure you need.
An in-depth analysis of your current system will assist you to determine the replacements and updates and will also help you recognize redundant resources that you can curb.
Here are the parameters you need to assess:
- Cost of your on-premise system: Make an exhaustive list of all the expenses you bear to run your on-premise infrastructure solution, including:
- Tangible expenses
- Recurring expenses such as contracts, physical environment, staff and operations
- Purchases such as hardware
- Indirect costs incurred to operate the system
- Components of your infrastructure: The number of servers you own and the storage levels you work with are all significant to build an efficient cloud infrastructure blueprint
- Elements you want to include or exclude in the cloud: You can analyze the workloads, software, and applications you want and don’t want to be a part of cloud infrastructure migration
- Identify potential compatibility issues: Not all your applications and software will seamlessly migrate to the cloud. A few of them would need upgrades, replacements, or modifications to function properly in the new infrastructure
- Phases of the migration process: Azure cloud migration process cannot be performed in one go. It needs to be done in phases to take care of business continuity. You need to decide which components to migrate in which phase based on their criticality and functionality
Chart your cloud infrastructure requirements and compute the cloud migration costs
After you have evaluated your existing on-premises situation, you should have clarity of the applications and resources you want to migrate to the cloud and the ones you will eliminate.
The list of the services that you want to migrate, and their functionality will impact your total cost. To compute the costs, make sure you take the following factors under consideration:
- Migration of Data: Data is the key element that you must migrate during the upgrade to the cloud. The security and efficiency of your data migration is of paramount importance to set up the new infrastructure. Though it is a time-consuming process that needs a lot of resources, and possibly also the support from a cloud infrastructure services vendor, a seamless data migration flow is essential for a hassle-free run of your operations later
- Integrate your workloads: While integrating your workloads into the cloud infrastructure, you may have to upgrade, modify, or replace a few applications and software so they can operate seamlessly in the cloud
- Testing Applications: To ensure all your applications will run at their full functionality, you must profoundly test your applications and their processes before you make a move to the cloud
- Consultant Fees: Deploying a cloud infrastructure and efficiently migrating multiple applications would need specific expertise in this field. A third-party Azure cloud migration services provider can bring in the specialization and perform the end-to-end process accurately and seamlessly
- Factor in the time: Almost 50% percent of the cloud migration costs consist of labor costs. The whole process, which includes infrastructure migration, testing, and verification needs a lot of human and time resources, which need to be accounted for in the total cost
Post-cloud migration costs
Have you successfully implemented the cloud infrastructure? Great!
Your post-migration phase would entail several direct and indirect expenses. To start with, you have the general cloud services costs. Additionally, the other expenses will include labor and training, maintenance, infrastructure operations, workload and application integrations, security requirements for data protection and compliance needs, patching, uptime, and monitoring, etc.
Cloud migration advantages and savings
Though the benefits of cloud migration are not only limited to cost savings, the reduction in expenditure could be substantial. Here are a few other vital savings that cloud infrastructure provides:
- Decreases legacy costs: With an on-premise solution, you have incurred cost of upgrades, maintenance, and additions to safeguard and make the hardware and software scalable. As the cloud doesn’t require much physical infrastructure, these costs are reduced considerably.
- Pay-as-you-go model: One of the key advantages of the cloud infrastructure is that it creates an environment that can be easily scaled up or down or modified as per the requirements. Hence, you are benefited by the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, for any changes to your infrastructure and environment in the future.
- Improves business efficiency: The forecasting and automation functions of the cloud infrastructure help you streamline end-to-end business processes, thus improving the operational efficiency.
- Helps profit growth: By enabling a better user experience and providing valuable insights, the cloud infrastructure helps you enhance vital business functions that can result in a growth of business and profits.
- Effective security: Almost all cloud infrastructure services vendors provide state of the art tools and technologies for security to protect and monitor the data, applications, and services.
The Cloud migration process is lengthy, technical, complicated and a little expensive, which is seldom carried out by a business with no experience in a proper way. You can leverage the diverse experience and expertise of an Azure cloud migration services provider like Columbus Global to perform the migration process efficiently and accurately within your budget constraints.
For more details on hassle-free migration to cloud infrastructure, understand the step-by-step process!
