How to Approach Budgeting and Cost Management for your Cloud Migration

According to Microsoft, almost two thirds of small and medium-sized businesses using cloud services report significant productivity benefits from IT, compared to 30% of those who have not yet migrated to the cloud.

And the potential advantages to be gained from delivering a cloud migration successfully don’t just stop with productivity. The cloud offers the ability to entirely transform your IT infrastructure, providing opportunities for greater:

• Scalability
• Agility
• Speed
• Performance
• Efficiency
• Innovation
• Competitive differentiation.

But the cloud also presents a number of risks and challenges, particularly when it comes to budgeting and managing your spending.

Why? Because many IT teams treat a cloud implementation like a traditional on-premise project, without realising they’re facing an entirely new concept when it comes to the costing model. To avoid challenges such as unexpected bills and significant over-spending, it’s important to understand the differences between the two.

Because the nature of a cloud environment is ever-changing, your spending – based on usage and scale – will be variable each and every month unless you take proactive steps to manage it.

As your costs will always fluctuate, your organisation’s activity must be carefully monitored and optimised to ensure budgets aren’t drastically exceeded.

Before investing in the cloud, both your senior leadership team and your IT team must both recognise they are agreeing to change from a capital expense (CapEx) costing model to an operational expense (OpEx) model with this new cloud-based IT infrastructure.

Most businesses who approach their cloud migration without the guidance of a specialist partner will fail to get this right the first time. Only when a cloud implementation is up and running do the challenges of budgeting and cost management become apparent, which for some businesses can be too late.

In order to gain the desired benefits from the cloud, including a strong ROI, you must have full control of your budget, usage, and spending.

To learn more about how to prepare for the uncertainties of a cloud migration, read our latest article here