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Many organizations consider cloud migration simply a cost‐reduction lever. However, bills can quickly become opaque and exceed forecasts, especially when tackling a strategic project without a consolidated view of expenses. Anticipating the different phases, identifying invisible cost items and rigorously governing usage are essential to turn this transition into a sustainable competitive advantage. IT and financial decision-makers must therefore treat cloud migration as a comprehensive undertaking—combining audit, technological adaptation and post-deployment governance—rather than a purely technical shift.
The Three Major Phases of a Cloud Migration and Their Associated Cost Items
A cloud migration is divided into three key stages, each generating direct and indirect costs. Thorough planning from the preparation phase onwards helps curb budget overruns. Mastering these critical cost items is the sine qua non of a project aligned with performance and profitability goals.
Migration Preparation
The preparation phase encompasses auditing existing infrastructure and evaluating the target architecture. This step often engages internal resources as well as external consultants to identify dependencies, map data flows and estimate the required effort.
Beyond the audit, you must budget for training teams on cloud tools and associated security principles. Upskilling sessions can represent a significant investment, especially if you aim to gradually internalize the operation of new platforms.
Finally, developing a migration strategy—single-cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud—requires modeling cost scenarios and anticipated gains. A superficial scoping can lead to late changes in technical direction and incur reconfiguration fees.
Technical Migration
During this stage, the choice of cloud provider directly affects resource pricing (compute instances, storage, bandwidth) and billing models (hourly, usage-based or subscription). Contracts and selected options can significantly alter the monthly invoice.
Adapting existing software—rewriting scripts, containerizing workloads, managing databases—also incurs development and testing costs. Each service to be migrated may require refactoring to ensure compatibility with the target infrastructure.
Engaging a specialized integrator represents an additional expense, often proportional to the complexity of interconnections. External experts orchestrate the decompositions into microservices, configure virtual networks and automate deployments.
Post-Migration
Once the cut-over is complete, operational costs do not vanish. Resource monitoring, patch management and application maintenance require a dedicated organizational setup.
Operational expenditures cover security fees, component updates and ongoing performance optimization to prevent over-provisioning or under-utilization of instances.
Finally, usage governance—managing access, defining quotas, monitoring test and production environments—must be institutionalized to prevent consumption overruns.
Use Case: A Swiss Company’s Cloud Migration
A Swiss industrial SME executed its application migration in three stages. During the audit, it uncovered undocumented cross-dependencies, resulting in a 20% cost overrun in the preparation phase.
The technical migration phase engaged an external integrator whose hourly rate was 30% higher than anticipated due to containerization scripts misaligned with DevOps best practices.
After deployment, the lack of a FinOps follow-up led to systematic over-provisioning of instances, increasing the monthly bill by 15%. Implementing a consumption dashboard subsequently cut these costs by more than half.
Often-Overlooked Costs in Cloud Migration
Beyond obvious fees, several hidden cost items can bloat your cloud invoice. Overlooking them exposes you to untracked and recurring expenses. Heightened vigilance on these aspects ensures budget control and avoids mid-term surprises.
Over-Provisioned Compute Resources
Initial sizing can be overestimated “just in case,” leading to billed servers or containers that are almost idle. Without regular adjustment, these resources become an unjustified fixed cost.
Instances left running after tests and development environments left active generate continuous consumption. This issue is hard to detect without proper monitoring tools.
Without configured autoscaling, manual resizing is time-consuming and prone to human error, occasionally doubling invoices during intensive testing periods.
Forgotten or Under-Utilized Licenses
Many vendors bill licenses per instance or user. When migrating to a new platform, paid features may be activated without measuring their actual usage.
Dormant licenses weigh on the budget without delivering value. It is therefore essential to regularly inventory real usage and disable inactive modules.
Otherwise, new monthly costs from unused subscriptions can quickly undermine server consumption optimization efforts.
Shadow IT and Parallel Services
When business teams deploy cloud services themselves—often through non-centralized accounts—the IT department loses visibility over associated expenses.
These rogue usages generate costly bills and fragment the ecosystem, complicating cost consolidation and the implementation of uniform security policies.
Governance must therefore include a single service request repository and an approval process to limit the proliferation of parallel environments.
Incomplete Migrations and Partial Integrations
A partial migration, with some services remaining on-premise and others moved to the cloud, can create technical friction. Hybrid interconnections incur data transfer and multi-domain authentication fees.
These hidden costs are often underestimated in the initial budget. Maintaining synchronization tools or Cloud-to-OnPremise gateways complicates management and drives operational expenses higher.
In one recent case, a Swiss financial services firm retained its on-premise directory without a prior audit. Connection fees between local and cloud environments resulted in an 18% overrun on the original contract.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support mid-sized and large enterprises in their digital transformation
Concrete Cloud Spending Scenarios
Cost trajectories vary widely depending on the level of preparation and the FinOps discipline applied. Each scenario illustrates the impact of organizational and governance choices. These examples help you understand how to avoid overruns and leverage the cloud sustainably.
Scenario 1: Rationalizing a CRM in the Cloud
A company decides to transfer its on-premise CRM to a managed cloud solution. By analyzing usage, it adjusts database sizes and reduces the architecture to two redundant nodes.
By combining reserved instances with on-demand servers during peaks, it halves its total infrastructure cost in the first year.
This success relies on fine-tuned resource management and automated alerts for consumption threshold breaches.
Scenario 2: Unplanned Migration and Budget Drift
Skipping the audit phase leads to a rushed migration. Applications are moved “as-is,” without refactoring, and allocated instances remain oversized.
The monthly cost quickly doubles as unused services continue running and unanticipated data transfer fees appear.
After six months, the organization implements monitoring, makes adjustments and stabilizes spending, but the budget has already suffered a cumulative 40% increase.
Scenario 3: Implementing a FinOps Approach
From project inception, a cross-functional team assigns clear responsibilities among IT, finance and business units. A weekly cost-per-service report is generated automatically.
Optimization processes are established to identify savings opportunities—decommissioning idle volumes, shifting to spot or reserved instances, powering down outside business hours.
Thanks to this governance, operational ROI is achieved in under twelve months without degrading user performance.
How to Control and Optimize Your Cloud Costs?
The combination of a FinOps approach, modular architecture and strict governance is the foundation of budget optimization. These levers enable real-time spending control and resource adjustment according to needs. Guidance from a contextual expert ensures pragmatic implementation aligned with business objectives.
Implement a FinOps Practice
The FinOps approach relies on collecting and allocating costs by functional domain. Implementing summary dashboards enhances visibility and decision-making.
Automated alerts notify you when consumption thresholds are exceeded, allowing immediate instance adjustments or planned scale-ups.
Budget management thus becomes collaborative, making each team accountable for its cloud footprint and fostering a culture of continuous optimization.
Adopt a Modular, Scalable Architecture
The granularity of cloud services—microservices, containers or serverless functions—allows precise sizing. Each component can scale independently.
With orchestration by Kubernetes or a managed service, resources can scale automatically according to load, avoiding any over-provisioning.
Modularity also reduces the risk of a global outage, as an incident on an isolated module does not affect the entire platform.
Train Teams and Govern Usage
The best architecture remains vulnerable if teams lack cloud tool proficiency. A continuous training program and best-practice guides are indispensable.
Defining quotas per project, centralizing requests and systematically approving new services guarantee controlled consumption.
Shared documentation and regular expenditure reviews reinforce transparency and stakeholder buy-in.
Concrete Case: Choosing Comprehensive, Contextual Support
A large Swiss financial enterprise, for example, engaged an expert partner to oversee the entire cloud lifecycle. The approach covered audit, migration, FinOps and post-migration governance.
This collaboration reduced vendor lock-in, optimized storage costs and automated updates while ensuring a high level of security.
After eighteen months, the organization had stabilized spending, improved time-to-market and established a virtuous performance cycle.
Turn Your Cloud Migration into a Strategic Advantage
Cloud migration is not just a cost-reduction lever; it’s an opportunity to rethink your IT architecture and establish a lasting FinOps culture. By anticipating each phase, avoiding hidden expenses and adopting agile governance, you secure your budget and enhance agility.
At Edana, our experts support you at every stage—from the initial audit to continuous optimization—to align your cloud migration with your business and financial objectives.
