It’s the word on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days, but turning to the cloud can become a big dilemma for businesses around the world.
For some companies, the cost savings are astronomical. For others, a cloud migration can be difficult – and this is where an in-depth cost analysis is required.
This is the reason we have put today’s post together. We will now mull over three areas that you need to consider as you think over your costs for a possible cloud migration.
The need to rewrite applications
Firstly, migrations are no walk in the park. They can be tricky beasts to conquer, for the simple reason that most apps which are hosted “locally” are developed in a manner that only works on these systems. As soon as they move away, things become a whole lot trickier.
Particularly if your application taps into third party data (which might even still be hosted locally), you enter a whirlwind of complexity. It can mean that some applications need to be written again, and this is something that you will naturally have to factor in to your overall costs.
Internal skills
Next on the list is one of the biggest misconceptions around when it comes to cloud computing. It is regularly assumed that as soon as you migrate to the cloud, the need to have an internal IT team is eradicated.
As it turns out, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Does the role of your IT team change? Absolutely. Suddenly, they won’t be used for repairing faults, but more for the issues that can enhance your systems. Ultimately, they will be adding more value to the company.
However, the important point to note here is that you need a team who knows what they are doing when it comes to migrations. As we have already covered, some applications may need to be rewritten, and having an in-house team that knows what they are doing will help you reach these decisions in an instant.
The costs of hardware
This final point covers both sides of the equation. Firstly, if you are presently hosting everything internally, you need to work out just what your costs are. You will be paying for certain infrastructure, and you need to use this as a baseline for what your potential cost savings will be if you move to the cloud.
The big benefit with this migration is that you will be able to scale up and down much more easily. While your costs might be set in stone locally (and potentially increase, if systems start to fail or become inadequate over time), with the cloud there is a much more consistent story. A change in requirements won’t result in completely new hardware and particularly when assessing your costs, this is something that you need to take note of. In other words, if your requirements are likely to regularly change, the cloud may bring these hardware costs down substantially.