IT Operations Blog

How to Accurately Estimate the Cost of Cloud Migrations

cloud-cubes
2 minute read
Al Brodie

One of the prevalent issues service owners, site reliability engineers (SREs), capacity planners, and cloud administrators face is how to accurately determine the cost effectiveness of migrating servers and business services that are hosted on-premises to the public cloud.

When evaluating cloud migrations, there are several factors to take into consideration to avoid negative implications, including:

  • Cost of workload migration: Estimating the projected costs of moving servers and services to the public cloud versus the cost of keeping them on-premises
  • Balancing cost versus risk: Determining the appropriate balance of cloud resources to stay within budgets while ensuring service assurance
  • Single server versus multiple server migration: Determining the impact and cost of migrating a single server or all servers that a business service requires to the public cloud
  • Forecasting resource requirements in the cloud: Managing multiple diverse, disconnected tools to analyze and forecast the capacity requirements in the cloud
  • Optimizing servers to maintain service quality: Aligning cloud server resources with business services to maintain service quality and service level agreements (SLAs)
  • Planning for future resource requirements: Identifying resources required to support future business demand and key performance indicators (KPIs)

If you don’t consider these potential hurdles, your cloud migrations could experience budget overruns, poor service quality, service interruptions, and slower onboarding of new services—all of which can affect profitability, customer loyalty and satisfaction, and competitive positioning in the market.

The good news is you can use “what if” simulations to estimate the costs of migrating workloads quickly and accurately to the cloud and aligning resources with business demand. “What if” migration simulations evaluate the opportunity and cost effectiveness of migrating on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and deliver right-sized recommendations to help reduce cloud cost and budget overruns and ensure service assurance. The “what if” simulation results enable you to:

  • Quickly determine the projected cost of using the public cloud versus the cost of your on-premises infrastructure
  • Have the flexibility to simulate the migration of selected servers or all servers that a business service uses
  • View optimized recommendations for instance sizes and other associated characteristics on the public cloud
  • Modify characteristics and evaluate the impact of the change on the overall migration cost
  • Accurately compare costs of migrations between cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud

To Learn More

Check out the following resources to understand effective strategies for accurately sizing and migrating on-premises resources to cloud.

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About the author

Al Brodie

Al Brodie is a Principal Solution Manager for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization and BMC Helix Platform. Al joined BMC Software 2 years ago after a lengthy career in Sales, Sales Management and Marketing in both the IT and Telecom industry.