Avoiding Budget Overruns During Cloud Migration

Many organizations have already started their migrations to the cloud, or soon plan to. It makes sense: The cloud is an attractive option for multiple reasons, including its potential for cost savings, scalability and support of continuous application development.

However, benefits aside, it can be very easy for enterprises to lose financial control of a cloud migration. The potential for costly mistakes when shifting to the cloud is significant, and organizations often end up getting hit with surprising bills that ultimately stop them in their tracks. In fact, in a 2020 survey, 94% of participants claim that it is a challenge for them to take full advantage of public cloud resources, with 40% citing the need to control cloud costs as their biggest obstacle.

These financial mistakes are typically made due to the pay-per-use model of cloud services and the growing cloud skills gap. Too often, IT team members are forced to work in cloud environments they are not proficient in, and as new features are released every week, it’s almost impossible for these individuals to keep up. One recent study claimed that 90% of enterprises found that their cloud skills gap doubled over a three-year period.

The Two Different Types of Cloud Migrations

There are two types of cloud migrations that typically occur, a lift and shift, or a replatform/rearchitecture migration. The lift and shift method is fast and relatively easy, but it doesn’t enable organizations to truly optimize their cloud usage. The rearchitecture method is the most popular as it gives an organization the opportunity to fix any outstanding issues by harnessing the benefits of cloud-native technologies and services.

However, once a rearchitecting migration begins, organizations often find it takes significantly more time, effort and resources to complete than they originally thought. This can become a real challenge, especially when facing critical deadlines or experiencing major events like the COVID-19 pandemic or the wild weather events experienced around the globe.

Understanding and Assessing Performance

For both types of cloud migrations, understanding and assessing performance and underlying architecture is an ongoing task, as cloud providers are always releasing new or improved services or lowering prices. To make sure they’re achieving the best performance and building a resilient architecture, application developers and IT teams must always be looking for ways to improve their applications. Within the cloud, this is typically focused on four key areas: Networking, computing, storage and application architecture.

From a network perspective, understanding where data is being used and where data is being accessed is critical and can help organizations cut costs exponentially. For example, cloud providers often have costly data ingress and egress charges, so assessing how best to access and use data when necessary can help a company navigate those charges.

Regarding computing, there are multiple resources that can help manage system load, make tweaks to computing infrastructure and find performance and cost benefits. For instance, leveraging the data and metrics from native cloud reporting tools can help organizations understand and predict demand, and taking advantage of services like auto-scaling enables them to scale up or down appropriately depending on the changes in application use and demand.

On the storage front, cloud providers offer a number of ways to save money and boost performance. From the release of GP3 volumes to tiered long-term storage options based on the frequency of access, storage is an easy way to find cloud savings opportunities. Additionally, cloud providers will usually make recommendations and set up tiering policies to help move data automatically into colder and deeper storage.

As cloud providers continue adding new services, looking at your application architecture is essential to innovation and cost savings—especially when including labor and effort—and truly achieving the promise of the cloud.

Solving Common Costly Mistakes

While there are numerous examples of common financial mistakes companies make when managing cloud instances, lack of visibility and understanding are the leading pain points for the developers who stand up and maintain their organization’s architecture. With the demand for cloud so high and with their attention directed elsewhere, developers and engineers often take the mentality of “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” This hampers the company’s ability to assess and optimize their cloud operations. They don’t have time to consistently review their applications for ways to save money or even know how much their decisions cost.

This ubiquitous issue can be solved by bringing greater visibility into the cloud migration and management process and aligning real-time finances directly with established corporate budgets. In addition, organizations struggling with the cloud services’ pay-per-use model should take the necessary steps—whether internally or with a third-party vendor—to ensure cloud resource and service use is being effectively monitored. This makes it easier for developers to understand where and how their actions affect the financial posture of the organization before their boss comes knocking on the door.

If enterprises provide the resources necessary for IT teams to become more knowledgeable about how their applications are being used within the cloud and address the cloud skills gap in their workforce, they will be able to prevent cost overruns, experience cost savings and take back control of their budgets. This can take a variety of forms, but enterprises need to establish continual training programs to ensure team members are up-to-date on the latest cloud features and services, as well as leverage tools and automation to reduce manual intervention. Providing this critical visibility throughout a cloud migration can often mean the difference between a successful, on-budget migration and one that is stalled and costly.