Numbers Don’t Lie: Cloud Migration Costs – Cloud Blog – VMware

Numbers don’t lie. Wow, really? How is that possible? It can’t be! Have you ever had that reaction after stepping on the scale? I know I have. Disappointment then leads into fact-finding mode.

• How many wings did I eat?
• How many calories are in cheese dip?
• But I only had one piece of key-lime pie.  

Weight isn’t the only health metric, but we know that
numbers don’t lie and often tell a story. Unfortunately, sometimes the extra
weight sneaks upon us.  

Are migration costs weighing down your “Cloud First” strategy?

Many have a similar reaction when they assess where they are in their “Cloud First” migration strategy. After receiving the corporate mandate, many CIOs and IT Directors began analyzing their current and future workload needs. Afterwards came a rationalization process, budget allocation, and resource alignment.  After a few weeks, it is time to check on the migration by standing on the “scale,” known as the status and budget report.  More often than naught, the reaction is – Wow? OMG! Really? Then the fact-finding begins.  

• How long does it take to re-host and refactor a workload?
• What training classes does our staff need?  
• Why do I need to add contractors, and how much do they charge per hour? 

Sound familiar? Truth is, there are “tech” calories involved with workload migration that may sneak up on you.  

• Staff upskilling or augmentation  
• Time to refactor a VM into a native cloud service 
• Cost to hire contractors or pay a consultancy 

VMC on AWS helps enterprises avoid the OMG reaction to cloud migrations. Note these statistics: 

• 46% faster or 4.5 months earlier on average – By completing faster migrations to the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS, organizations can start realizing the benefits of public cloud adoption at an earlier time, allowing them to capture these productivity and business-related benefits sooner. As shown below, IDC calculated the total value of productivity and business gains from faster migration at an average of $208,100 per 100 VMs. 

• $2.7M savings – By migrating workloads from their on-premises software-defined data centers to the cloud in a seamless manner, organizations avoid the need to re-architect applications for use with new tools. Maintaining operational consistency with existing vSphere deployments saved organizations hundreds of labor hours in migration work per application.   

A Forrester study found that during a one-year migration, organizations saved time during the following migration phases: 

• Initial discovery phase: Engaging known stakeholders to make application dependency discovery. This includes network, systems, information security, application support, and application owners. 
• Adjacent team engagement: Engaging other teams that are discovered to have dependencies. 
• Migration planning: Discussing time of the move, expected impact, and migration methods.  
• Migration engineering: Setting up DNS, load balancers, firewall rules, and migration scripts. 
• Migration execution: All teams and stakeholders on deck for monitoring efforts and remedial actions such as firewall rules or permissions. 

The VMware Cloud Economics team wants to help you avoid the “tech” debt that is weighing down your cloud migration and skip the OMGs and subsequent fact-finding exercise that often come with cloud migration projects. Our cloud economic analyses show a total cost reduction in about 80% of the TCO reports we produce, with migration savings being a key driver.  Numbers don’t lie, and we can prove it. Reach out for your free TCO assessment today at https://vmctco.vmware.com or engage with a Cloud economist at cloud-economics@vmware.com.