Calculating the cost of your existing IT infrastructure
The cost of your existing IT infrastructure to your organisation is made up of two main components. These are the direct costs and indirect costs.
Direct costs include the cost of buying and maintaining hardware and software. This can include the cost of servers, software licences, maintenance and repairs. Also the cost of physically hosting your infrastructure, be it on premise or in a data centres, as well as additional costs such as internet bandwidth, power, air conditioning, etc . It should also include the cost of staff to maintain, install, secure and patch your hardware and software. If you have a disaster recovery plan which covers co-located servers then these should be considered in the costs too.
Indirect costs can be difficult to estimate but might include the financial impact of outages of your infrastructure due to, for example, server outages or the costs of planned outages on productivity or income.
Assessing your cloud requirements
Whilst you may know how much hardware and software, plus associated items, costs may be it is also important to assess the utilisation of these resources. For example, how much storage space does your infrastructure require, how much network bandwidth are you using, how large are your databases, etc. Also you should look at growth patterns and your future requirements so you can predict, say, how much storage you will be using in 3 years time.
Calculating the AWS cloud migration costs
For any cloud migration project there are two types of cost:
- The up front cost of performing the migration. This may be as simple as virtualising and moving servers to the cloud through to a full AWS serverless rewrite of applications
- The ongoing cloud costs of the data to day running of the system.
For the upfront costs of performing the migration you will need to assess the costs of staff or consultants to perform the migration. This is a task which is best done with some experience in the type of migration you wish to undertake. Simply virtualising servers into the cloud will generally be more straightforward and lower cost upfront than a full AWS serverless architecture software development project but may not provide the business agility benefits that can be gained by moving to the cloud. Upfront costs are very dependent on the type of migration project undertaken. To gain an insight into the different options check out this AWS Cloud Migration Strategy document.
Working out ongoing costs is usually somewhat easier than calculating upfront migration costs. AWS help you calculate the ongoing cost of your cloud system(s) with the AWS Pricing Calculator. Using this tool you can select the various AWS cloud services you require along with your projected usage. For example for storage you can select the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). The tool does require some knowledge of cloud systems and how usage affects price but if you are considering a cloud migration project these are areas you should be researching or hiring a company to help you with. There is also a ‘chicken and egg’ situation here where it may be difficult to estimate the ongoing cost of an AWS serverless application until the architecture has been designed. Again this is an area where engaging with a consultant with experience of this type of migration can be valuable.
Get in touch for a free consultation and explore the potential savings you could make by migrating to the cloud.
