When migrating to the cloud, all the costs involved may not always be clear. Have you accounted for refactoring, reskilling and vendor lock-in costs in your migration plan? Discover the top migration blind spots and how to address them in our latest cloud economics article.
When comparing the VMware Cloud on AWS solution to cloud native alternatives, it is important to understand the hidden costs or “blind spots” that may exist in a cloud native migration plan. There are significant labor and time expenses that are incurred with this type of migration. Among these are:
- Refactoring Time – time consumed per application or workload to redesign, recode, rearchitect and redeploy on the target cloud platform. This can include the following project risks:
- Application Dependency Discovery – this could consume significant time and can doom a migration project if undocumented dependencies are not discovered.
- Learning Curve – initial migrations will take longer and introduce more error.
- Unexpected Errors – when applications are changed, the door is reopened for process error to enter.
- Scope Creep – no matter how carefully planned, nearly every project will “grow legs” and begin to exceed the planned scope.
- Project Interruption – staff dedicated to the migration will inevitably lose project time due to other priorities and/or emergencies.
- Retraining and Reskilling Time – time and cost spent to train IT staff to effectively redesign and redeploy applications on the target cloud platform.
- Vendor Lock-in – once the applications begin to leverage cloud vendor proprietary functionality, it becomes very difficult to change vendors or even move workloads back on-premise.
In a project involving the migration of applications to a cloud native environment, these costs can be significant. We have seen industry research suggesting the migration of 1,000 VM workloads can take over one year to complete and cost well over $1,000,000. It is important to note that this work effort is essentially “KTLO” (Keeping The Lights On). This work rarely delivers any additional functionality to the enterprise unless in-depth reprogramming is done, which may further extend the project’s time frame. And while resources are being consumed with migratory work, other strategic market opportunities may be lost.
VMware Cloud on AWS essentially “abstracts” the cloud provider layer, just as vSphere abstracted physical hardware, thereby allowing workloads to be managed with a common toolset and effortlessly moved between cloud ecosystems. Workloads can be migrated to the cloud in a fraction of the time without refactoring, redesigning, recoding or rearchitecting. Potential errors, application dependencies, and learning curves are practically eliminated, while scope creep can be reduced simply by the swiftness of the migration process. IT staff require little to no additional training and the enterprise is not locked into a specific cloud provider. VMware-based workloads can be just as easily moved back on-premises if the need arises.
The VMware Cloud Economics team has developed a Blind Spot Calculator to help enterprises understand the true cost of cloud migration options by identifying and quantifying these factors.
For more information, please contact your VMware Cloud Specialist and ask for a TCO analysis of your cloud migration. We’ll be happy to help.
