AWS Cloud Migration: Thinking Beyond the Price Tag
Oct 28, 2020
You have been contemplating migrating apps or systems to the AWS Cloud. It is a big decision, and cost is obviously top-of-mind. But focusing only on the price tag associated with migration is a trap that can lead to escalating frustrations and missed opportunities down the road. We will look at two reasons why selecting cloud solutions on cost alone is a bad idea – and how to avoid this trap.
1. Limited ability to scale and adapt in future
Choosing a cloud solution based on cost alone can limit your abilities to scale and adapt in the future. Your organization is dynamic: you likely have needs and demands facing you today that you could not have anticipated five years ago. Similarly, the cloud solution you implement today should be able to flex and scale to the unknown demands your organization will face five years from now.
That’s why selecting a cloud solution on cost alone can be deeply limiting. You might think of it like picking an office space. You can choose the smallest, cheapest commercial property, but if your business grows, you will either need to move to a new location or make do with subpar working conditions for yourself and your employees.
Just like with real estate, you cannot choose the cloud solution with the lowest sticker price and then expect to have the same performance, adaptability capabilities, and life expectancy as a more premium option. In these scenarios, it is all about balancing current needs with anticipated growth.
2. An inability to innovate
Moving from a traditional data center to the AWS Cloud is a paradigm shift. Possibilities await beyond the narrow problem that might have triggered your decision to migrate. Considering cloud operations means focusing on a broader picture with an innovative outlook. It demands shifting outside of the silos of individual departments, and even re-thinking above the divisions between operating costs and capital expenditure to a more comprehensive assessment of total cost of ownership and return on investment (we’ll discuss this more in our next blog post).
When measured as an all-encompassing system, a properly leveraged AWS Cloud Solution has the ability to deliver compelling cost savings. But even so, making decisions based on price alone means missing the real opportunity – the opportunity to break out of the confines imposed by the data center, revisit traditional operational practices and organizational structures, and free the pent-up demands from business that could not previously be fulfilled. Cloud is about providing capabilities; the savings realized across the organizational model are simply the result of going about business in a better way.
Thinking Big Picture
As we saw in our last blog post, choosing a cloud solution – and a provider – is more than solving a one-off business problem. It’s the chance to optimize your organization to meet future demands and provide your end-users with a seamless, top-level experience. Thinking “big picture” rather than “price tag” as you make your initial decisions will set you up for future success and cost savings down the road.
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Learn more:
Now you understand how a move to the cloud is a paradigm shift offering the potential for future growth and agility. But you still need to understand how cloud expenditures fit into your budget. In our next blog post, we will explore some often-overlooked factors to weigh when budgeting for the cloud.
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Asim Iqbal
Asim is Enquizit’s CTO and a member of the founding team. He has been an SME on security, storage, and resilience as well as Enquizit’s Lead Architect and VP of Solution Architecture. Among his professional endeavors is the implementation of a weather modeling HPC setup for Environment Canada, storage design and implementation for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s library, Media ingestion, encryption, and transcoding architecture for Bell Satellite TV, Cloud infrastructure, resilience, and security architecture and implementation for The Common Application and complete migration of Harvard Business Review’s Primary and DR data center to AWS. He maintains a strong personal interest in frictionless technical designs focused on end-user happiness and employee satisfaction, still thinks that ‘Data Availability Architect’ (from his early days working with HPE) is the coolest certification title ever and is an ex-CISSP. He neither confirms nor denies his purported afflictions with coffee, slow travel, and cats with unbridled spirits.
