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Small and medium businesses
Does your business need cloud migration?
Many enterprises are moving to the Cloud. A key reason for moving to the Cloud is to reduce the organization’s expenditure on internal IT. Conventional wisdom tells us that cloud migration allows businesses to expand and scale while working within the existing infrastructure.
While these are the common assumptions companies make while considering the cloud migration strategy, the actual cloud cost might be higher if we add all costs involved in cloud migration, maintenance, servicing, and operation.
So now, you must be thinking about whether the operating cost of Cloud is cheaper or more expensive? And that’s a tricky question, and so is the answer. Finding the operating cost of Cloud is not that straightforward and needs evaluation of multiple aspects. Let look into various factors that we need to consider while planning the Cloud migration. And find out cloud agnostic meaning.
Cost of migrating data to cloud
The cost involves the process of transferring the business data to the Cloud and involves cost for
1. Assessing the cloud-readiness of your applications
2. Repackaging or modifying the applications that are not ready for the Cloud
3. Creating and executing a test plan that ensures efficient data migration and synchronization.
4. Lastly, the efforts involved in actual data migration.
Cost of maintaining cloud
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is an excellent cloud cost tool to calculate the cloud service’s maintenance cost. TCO is calculated by adding costs for licenses’ support fees and growing users & data, hardware upgrades, and database administrators’ costs to maintain existing databases. As the data grows, the cost of running the Cloud will grow.
Cloud to cloud migration
Cloud to cloud migration is a practical scenario that we have experienced with many of our customers. Based on their research, customers typically choose a vendor for hosting their data on the Cloud, but they often experience practical difficulties getting the support, features, or overall system performance.
Thus, the need to move to another cloud arises.
The Cloud-to-cloud migration will need reassessing the new cloud platform in terms of compatibility with applications, creating and executing the test plan to ensure efficient data migration. It will also incur some costs in the actual data migration.
Companies should ideally plan for a cloud-to-cloud migration while creating their cloud strategy. That way, they can ensure that they are platform-agnostic, and the cost and efforts required to move from Cloud to cloud are minimal.
It is also imperative to have a strategy for moving applications from the Cloud back to the owned data center or another cloud. Such flexibility will pay off in case if the selected Cloud price tag would come with surprises or unforeseen additional expenses.
Regulatory needs of geography
For companies spread across countries or states, awareness of local regulations is necessary. Many countries now make it compulsory to maintain certain user data inside specific geographical boundaries. Thus, a multi-cloud strategy involving multiple geographies is necessitated.
Optimizing cloud migration
Companies have several options for optimizing cloud migration costs. Let’s explore three cloud strategies that businesses can use, in combination to optimize Cloud investments.
Hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud combines a private cloud (typically implemented on-premises) with one or more public cloud services, ensuring fast communication between this distinct service while providing businesses with greater flexibility.
This option allows the business to decide on workload placement at any time of the Cloud journey. The applications can relocate from Private to Public Cloud and back as needed or based on the financial or regulatory benefits.
For an organization with a large and complex IT infrastructure with a humongous amount of data, migrating complete data might not be feasible. Such organizations might need to scale the workloads into separate, remote data centers with a managed environment that is less complex to manage.
Hybrid Cloud also makes sense for organizations that use applications that require specifically customized server configurations. They either cannot be migrated or upgrading the system might become too expensive.
Cloud-agnostic strategy
The cloud-agnostic strategy provides businesses with the flexibility of shifting to a different environment without hurdles. It ensures the cloud hosting is independent of the service provider in the cloud migration process. A cloud-agnostic strategy facilitates the business operation with any public cloud service provider with minimal disruptions.
This strategy increases productivity and efficiency as your business no longer needs to depend on a single service provider However, such an approach will require a change in the application development process and potentially in company culture. Applications will need to be designed and packaged to be able to function in any environment.
Multi-cloud strategy
A multi-cloud strategy allows businesses to utilize multiple cloud services and choose service providers with a better option for specific tasks than others.
Various cloud vendors provide differentiated features and services. A multi-cloud strategy gives you the choice of selecting multiple packages for different tasks.
For example, you may want to use a cloud platform specializing in providing smooth data migration irrespective of the data load while offering integrated machine learning capabilities.
Summing up
The cloud migration process involves making difficult choices and considering different factors like cost of hosting, cost of migration, making existing systems cloud-ready, software upgrades, etc.
Decisions on the Cloud strategy are often biased and taken with a certain amount of sacrifice to the original goals.
Cloud offers certain apparent benefits like insignificant initial investment compared to on-premises, which requires significant investment in setup costs.
However, the data migration and maintenance costs could balance out the hardware and software expenses of on-premises.
In the end, it is difficult to say if Cloud will be a cheaper alternative or not. Every business needs to conduct a thorough analysis to make a prudent decision. By the way, cloud migration is one of the most popular oil and gas industry technology trends and many others areas.
At Digicode, we understand all cloud migration challenges to migrate from AWS to GCP. Cloud migration services involve making difficult choices and considering different factors like cost of hosting, cost of migration, making existing systems cloud-ready, software upgrades, etc. Our team combines deep industry and market insight with technology experience to provide technology solutions for small and medium sized business and help you evaluate the best cloud migration strategy, operating model, roadmap, and ecosystem partnerships. We then assist you in making an unbiased decision and executing a stable, cost-effective, and agile cloud migration and modernization. Get in touch with Digicode today.
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