When deciding whether to migrate your critical workloads to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, it can be difficult to understand what your full scope of spending will be. AWS total cost of ownership (TCO) varies from organization to organization, as many have differing compliance and security requirements, customer expectations for service and availability, and DevOps goals. A look beneath the hood of your own company’s workloads, application interdependencies, and licensing requirements will yield a good ballpark figure of where your AWS spending may lie, but not the full picture.

Mapping the Full Picture of AWS Total Cost of Ownership

To achieve the full view of AWS total cost of ownership (TCO), your company must first have a good perspective of what your current TCO is, whether that is for an on-premises environment or in a third-party datacenter. Only once you have these numbers will you be able to do an accurate comparison between that and the intended AWS environment, and what adjustments will need to be made prior to the migration. The problem is that many companies attempt to do this TCO assessment manually, which in turn creates bottlenecks, inaccurate estimates and ultimately slows down the decision process. Oftentimes, the results are based on an over-provisioned infrastructure, which then inflates their estimate of potential future public cloud costs. As a result, simply lifting and shifting the current infrastructure to the cloud will not yield the benefits that they are seeking.

To assess the true potential cost, utilization information has to be mapped to a right-sized environment. Only by doing this can organizations optimize IT infrastructure costs and increase business agility. There are many prescriptive approaches to determining your existing TCO for your IT systems, as well as tools to assist in this work, but such an assessment should also be inclusive of conversations among your business and its leadership about what the ultimate goals are for the AWS cloud. Simply lowering IT costs in the cloud won’t always be the answer – what do you want to achieve by lowering those costs?

Get InterVision’s Assessment of AWS Total Cost of Ownership

InterVision is proud to have recently announced a free, Pre-Migration Cost Assessment Service to help organizations understand the potential cost savings when moving on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud. Our assessment answers the following questions:

• What will it cost to run my current workloads in the cloud on AWS?
• What will it cost to move my current workload to the cloud?
• What will I need to provision based on my current utilization, not what I have (over) provisioned?
• What are my options when dealing with existing software licenses?
• How does my current on-premises TCO compare to an AWS TCO?

This rapid engagement leverages an agentless tool provided by CloudChomp. The tool installs in less than 30 minutes and provides an AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis within a day.

Utilization information is analyzed to produce optimized AWS price scenarios, thereby minimizing your company’s future TCO.

To learn more, reach out here for a conversation.