DIFFERENT WAYS CLOUD MIGRATION AND MANAGEMENT COSTS GO OFF THE RAILS

PART II

DIFFERENT WAYS CLOUD MIGRATION AND MANAGEMENT COSTS GO OFF THE RAILS.

Any cloud provides an opportunity to transform the way your company does business. Cloud adoption can assist you in lowering costs, becoming more agile, developing new skills more quickly, and providing your customers with dependable, globally available services. As a result, it is equally important to have a solid understanding of the various ways cloud migration can go wrong in your enterprise. Let us explore how the migration and management costs could go off the rails.:

1. Companies do lift and shift migration because it is easy. However, this may result in a large footprint in the cloud, which results in larger usage bills.

Lift-and-shift is the cheapest migration model if you’re only considering pure migration costs since you aren’t paying for code or configuration change. In addition, Lift-and-shift requires minimal effort to move on-premise applications to the cloud. However, it typically does not provide all of the benefits of a true cloud platform, and these upfront savings may end up costing more in the long run if opportunities to optimize workload costs are missed. They may also face additional challenges in migration, such as latency and performance issues.

2. Hyper scalers charge for egress. As a result, fees may skyrocket unless the architecture is validated to provide optimal egress.

You will not be charged for importing data to hyper-scale cloud providers’ platforms. When you remove/export data, however, they charge you a hefty fee. These egress fees can be prohibitively expensive for many businesses. According to IDC, 99 percent of U.S. technology executives incur planned or unplanned egress fees at least once a year.

Apart from the above one-time charge, Cloud providers charge for data that leaves their network. There could be a charge for data transfer between application components, which might be in different logical locations (Regions, Zones, etc.) even within the same Cloud provider. The application architecture has an impact on these charges.

3. Vendor-specific approaches to cloud adoption may result in lock-in.

Due to a lack of standardization, vendor lock-in is a significant barrier to cloud computing adoption. The majority of current vendor lock-in solutions and efforts are technological in nature. The cost of relocating the workload to different clouds will eventually become prohibitive. Most customers are unaware of proprietary standards that impede application interoperability and portability when utilizing vendor services.

Choosing cloud provider-specific services will increase the cost and time required to migrate the services to a lower-cost provider later on, if necessary. However, these can be overlooked due to various factors, such as negotiating an entry and exit strategy with your vendor upfront and keeping on-premise options open.

4. Lack of in-house cloud expertise

Expertise is undoubtedly required if the cloud migration process is to be aligned with your company, which knows the ropes of running successful cloud migration projects. Undoubtedly, expensive resources occur due to cost overrun. A team requires not only management skills but also mature experience and a thorough understanding of the cloud environment. Furthermore, cloud experts will be required after migration to take care of the operational activities of security, monitoring, and log management.

5. Failures in finding and choosing the right partners and right tools for migration can add up costs and risks

In an ideal situation, when you do not have in-house expertise, selecting the right cloud partner would be as simple and straightforward as using the cloud itself. Any selection, however, takes time to qualify the right partner based on where your company is in its cloud journey. Therefore, always choose partners who specialize in moving businesses to the cloud and have a team of high-quality experts and tools who have worked with companies of all sizes, sectors, and needs; otherwise, you may end up spending more time, effort, and money.

6. Lack of automation, auto-scaling, and auto-healing features being implemented.

Lack of low touch or fully automated migrations, deployments, and management can often increase time to market and the respective costs involved. Most cloud providers charge based on total usage rather than maximum capacity for infrastructure hosted in the cloud. If features like auto-scaling are not enabled, cloud costs/bills and containers will be flat even during low load periods. If not monitored continuously, applications may result in excessive resource usage due to code or configuration flaws. 

CONCLUSION

Cloud offers tremendous benefits for enterprises, which are looking for quick time to market, agility in responding to market conditions and flexible operational cost for IT infrastructure. There is an explosion of options in the market of service providers offering cloud. However, if not done carefully, cloud migration and management costs can go off the rails very easily. This article covered a few of the common causes for costs overrun during your cloud migration and adoption. 

The next section of this article also talks about remedies to keep your cloud migration costs on the rails.

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