How to Keep Costs in Check When You Migrate to the Cloud

How to Keep Costs in Check When You Migrate to the Cloud

Migrating your organisation to the cloud sounds simple – but, like any project, it only works successfully if it is properly managed from the start. Without a comprehensive strategy for managing costs and cloud operations, businesses find themselves having to repatriate to old systems as costs spiral out of control – an especially notable disaster when most companies are moving to the cloud to save costs in the first place. This isn’t a cloud problem – it’s a planning problem. Here are some tips for optimising your migration and keeping costs in check.

Know Your Goal

Why is your organisation planning to migrate to the cloud?

It’s important to have a clear and goal-orientated strategy that shows why your business is moving to the cloud. Not wanting to upgrade hardware or simply doing it because it’s the latest innovation that everyone else is getting on board with isn’t enough.

Once your goals have been decided, whether it’s to improve data security, due to CPAEX vs OPEX, better resource allocation, improved disaster recovery, better team collaboration, increased organisation scalability or anything else, these goals need to be mapped to your migration to help prevent that dreaded scope creep.

Understand the Variables that Will Affect the Project

The importance of the planning phase of implementing a cloud migration can’t be emphasised enough. Organisations need to be well aware of what variables will impact the cost of the project, how they will do so and what viable alternatives exists. This is critical to developing a budget and understanding what operating on the cloud actually costs.

Factors such as storage hardware, processors, LUN usage, memory, bandwidth, redundancy, VPNs, and more as well as the overall architecture all need to be reviewed in terms of your current environment and your migratory environment.

Right-Sizing Your Cloud Environment

One of the biggest errors that result in overspending on a new cloud environment is failure to commit to right sizing.Right-sizing involves monitoring and analysing performance and usage needs in order to cut out areas that are incorrectly matched or over catered to. Often, organisations simply replicate their existing VM resource allocations onto the cloud without checking to see it they are really needed. Other times, right-sizing doesn’t occur because organisations take a “better safe than sorry” approach by oversupplying resources they don’t really need in order to avoid a potential issue. In some cases, unethical vendors actively support these concerns, pushing organisations to allocate resources they don’t need in order to maximise their sale.

Organisations who work to optimise computer, network and storage settings while developing a strategic pricing plan are able to better match performance to cost, and can reduce cloud costs by over 40% in many cases. A managed IT services partner is invaluable in this case, being able to access performance and load data in much greater detail and being able to confidently cut costs without putting performance at risk through having a critical expertise in this particular field.

Find the Right IT Services Provider to Run Your Cloud Migration

Migrating to the cloud is a significant investment for many organisations, and can easily run out of control if not planned and managed effectively from the start. Having the right IT services partner will make this transition as smooth and efficient as possible, lowering an organisation’s total cost of ownership and controlling cloud costs while delivering on strategic organisational goals for agility, collaboration, security and disaster recovery.

Otto IT operates at the forefront of the managed IT services industry, offering comprehensive services to protect your organisation’s data while ensuring your IT network operates at optimal efficiency. We will work with your organisation at every level of your cloud migration project, helping to determine strategic goals and the most cost-effective solutions to achieve them – all without putting your organisation at risk of scope creep and spiralling costs.

Contact us today and chat to our team about whether or not the cloud is the right solution for your business.