A desire for lower infrastructure costs drives cloud migration. Instead of purchasing and maintaining new hardware, you can move it to the cloud. Just wipe your hands clean, and you’re done. Right?

It’s not that simple. Cloud migration is a phenomenon that has recently been reported. This involves businesses returning to their original location after a poorly-optimized migration. Cloud repatriation resulted in lower cost savings than expected.

Cloud users who are not satisfied with the service often do not understand why they should move to the cloud. It’s not enough to say, “everyone is doing it,” “it will save us money,” or “I no longer want to upgrade my hardware.”

A strategic cloud migration is important. This is not a simple lift-and-shift switch. What are you trying to achieve by moving your business to the cloud? Do you want to improve flexibility and scalability with a cloud migration? Cloud migration will enhance your data security and backup policies.

Plan Your Migration with Purpose…

Planning is the key to maximizing cloud migration and saving both time and money. Imagine it in this way. Predicting is key if you want to achieve cloud-based cost management. In order to predict accurately, you must know as many variables as possible.

When planning a migration to the cloud, determining which variables are important is only half the battle. Before a cloud migration, every aspect must be taken into consideration. This includes VMs, memory, VPNs, storage hardware, processor redundancy, LUN use, snapshots, replication, and more.

It is important to evaluate your current deployment, even though the variables can be overwhelming. In this case, “You cannot improve what you do not measure.” This is true.

You can determine the best way to implement each variable in your migration environment once you understand how each element of infrastructure acts in your current domain.

Then document It!

Documentation that is referenceable and executable is an essential part of the discovery and planning phase. It helps to prevent scope creep in later stages.

Businesses can lower the price of cloud services by taking the time and effort to document all variables. They should also align the variables with strategic goals.

How can you document the cloud migration process? Mindsight utilizes a customized server matrix for tracking application interdependencies. This ensures a smooth migration.

Please Read This Note About Right-Sizing Your Environment

Right-sizing your cloud environment is one of the most common mistakes that companies make when they migrate to the cloud. Lack of planning is one of the main reasons for overspending.

To achieve an optimal cloud configuration, you must optimize your computing, storage, and network settings while negotiating a pricing strategy that maximizes performance.

CIO.com reports that businesses that prioritize the right-sizing of cloud instances can reduce public cloud costs by up to 40%. You must understand your application and workload environment to the right size without affecting performance or capability.

The right-sizing of your cloud environment will help you achieve a measurable ROI and manage cloud costs.

Cloud Cost Management Is Achievable

IDG Enterprise discovered that 42% out of over 900 IT decision-makers agree that lowering the total cost of ownership was a major driver for most cloud initiatives.

But keeping cloud costs in check isn’t easy. DevOps or a lack of visibility in the cloud can lead to public cloud costs that are out of control.

Suppose you’re still considering a cloud migration or hoping to optimize current deployments. In that case, it is essential to evaluate your current setups, perform a review of your architecture, make sure to optimize costs via usage metrics, and secure your cloud environments.