Cloud computing is extremely advanced and an essential service for small and large businesses that are looking to grow and progress at a faster pace. It offers exceptional stability, scalability and security. Cloud services are remarkably cost-efficient too. Vast numbers of enterprises are moving to cloud servers every day around the globe. This is a proven fact, as shown by a report by the Hosting Tribunal, which states that around 83% of the enterprise workload is on cloud servers in 2020. The report also states that around 94% of businesses already use some form of cloud service. Enterprises were found to allocate around 30% of their IT budget to cloud computing.
The report also showed that over 50% of businesses spend more than US$ 1.2 million annually on cloud services, the cloud computing industry is expected to reach a global market of US$ 623.3 billion in the next 3 years. However, these figures should not deter small to medium-sized enterprises with the misconception that cloud computing services are expensive. This is far from the truth and you can find it out yourself with the steps on how to calculate cloud migration estimation for your enterprise.
Three Steps to Get Accurate Cloud Migration Estimation
Business owners will tell you that there are several things to consider before deciding to shift enterprise applications and databases from on-site servers to the cloud platform. However, the chief factor for making the decision is the cost of migration.
Here are the three simple steps that can help you with better cloud migration estimation:
STEP 1 – Take an Inventory of Your Current IT Infrastructure
It is essential to know the scale of your existing operations. An audit of your IT infrastructure is the best way to know this. The audit will reveal the cost of running your complete operation’s inventory. It will also give you a more accurate clue of how your on-site IT architecture will look on the cloud platform.
The bottom line of the audit should help you get a closer estimate of the potential cost of running your operations in the cloud environment. You will need to find the total cost of usage and maintenance of your current IT infrastructure over a long period of time. In this audit, you need to take into account two types of costs:
- Direct costs – These costs include the price of software and hardware, the cost of buying and maintaining physical servers, maintenance contracts, software license charges, warranties, materials, supplies, spare parts, etc. Direct costs also include charges for labor and maintenance of servers, database and other technologies, the cost of housing on-site servers, internet connection charges and any other cost related to IT.
- Indirect costs – These costs are more dynamic and may include the value of loss in productivity by employees and customers at server downtime as well as the loss of revenue in such an event.
While you are gathering data for audit, make sure to find out how much network bandwidth, database capacity and storage space your operation consumer presently. This is also an excellent way to get finer details of IT infrastructure, such as the number of servers being used, the type of database and its storage capacity, etc. This information comes handy in calculating accurate cloud migration estimation.
STEP 2 – Figure Out the Potential Cost of Creating Cloud Infrastructure
Once you know an estimate of the cost of using your current IT infrastructure, you will need to find the potential cost of cloud infrastructure. With step 1, you know the basics of your current network, database and storage needs. This detail helps when estimating the potential cost of operating and maintaining your business applications and database on the cloud platform.
Leading cloud service providers have their own Cost Calculators that are excellent to get the best cloud migration estimation. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, etc all provide Cost Calculator on their official website.
After accessing the Basic Cost Calculator, you only need to enter details of your current, or planned, infrastructure, which includes server types, CPU cores, number of virtual machines, memory (GB), type of storage, capacity for raw storage, etc from drop-down lists.
With Advanced Cost Calculator, you need to enter more precise details, such as information regarding the IT and network labor costs. Once you follow this three-stepped process, you will be able to use the Advanced Cost Calculator with ease and get accurate cloud migration estimation.
STEP 3 – Find Out the Cost of Cloud Migration
The final step required finding out the total cost of actually modifying and moving your IT infrastructure from on-site to cloud servers. In this step, you will need to consider the costs of moving data to the cloud, integrating and testing the apps and the consultation fees of cloud migration services.
Last, but not the least, you will also need to figure out the long-term cost of operating and maintaining your cloud-based infrastructure. Considering everything, choosing to move to cloud servers is an exceptionally sound business decision and it supports enterprises to grow and progress at an astonishing rate.
Calculate Average Cost of Cloud Computing