The shift of on-premises workloads to the cloud entails countless variables, options and decisions, and no two initiatives will be alike. One certainty, though, is that an organization will face cloud migration costs when it begins that transition.
The extent of those costs will depend on how well a business prepares itself. The process involves a clear-eyed look at which workloads are good candidates for a cloud provider's servers. Some will be, and some will not. Certain legacy applications will be a poor fit for the cloud. And even where it is possible to move most workloads, replicating in the cloud what you're doing on premises will be a costly blunder.
One of the key drivers of cloud adoption, after all, is the notion that a business will spend less when it pays a service provider to handle servers and deliver unlimited capacity. That may or may not end up being the case, but it is possible to head off trouble by getting the migration phase right.
That means moving the right applications in ways to make sure your cloud migration costs don't get out of hand, writes IT instructor Brian Kirsch in this handbook. In his tip, he recommends ways to handle the movement of data to the cloud. The transfer itself, he notes, can be a costly and time-consuming process. In addition, a business will need to address staff training, which comes at a cost. Kirsch also dispels some false assumptions about how the adoption of cloud services changes both the size and responsibilities of the operations team.
These factors will challenge an organization, especially one that has run an on-premises IT infrastructure for a long time. With a well-planned transition, though, it is possible to contain cloud migration costs and begin your cloud journey the right way.
