Cloud migration is one of the most common IT decisions of recent years — and one of the most poorly executed. The promise is seductive: get rid of servers, pay only for what you use, scale instantly. The reality, for many companies, is a monthly bill that grows out of control and nostalgia for the predictability of the old server in the office.
The good news: the cloud is not the problem, the way you migrate is. With the right strategy, the cloud really does cut costs and increase resilience. Here is how we approach a migration so you are not caught by surprise.
Why cloud bills explode
Most budget overruns come not from provider pricing but from wrong architecture decisions at migration time:
- Blind lift-and-shift: you move the server exactly as it was on-premises, with oversized resources now billed by the hour, 24/7.
- Forgotten resources: test environments, storage volumes and reserved IPs left running and billed for months.
- Unestimated egress traffic: transferring data out of the cloud has a cost no one calculates in advance.
- No cost governance: no one monitors who spins up which resources and with what budget.
The 6R strategy: not everything moves the same way
The fundamental mistake is treating all applications identically. The 6R framework, which we apply to each workload individually, decides the right treatment:
- 1Rehost ("lift-and-shift"): move the application as-is. Fast, but no savings unless you resize resources.
- 2Replatform: small optimizations during migration (e.g. a managed database instead of one on a VM) — good gains with moderate effort.
- 3Refactor: rewrite the application to be cloud-native. Higher upfront cost, but the largest long-term savings.
- 4Repurchase: replace the application with a SaaS service (e.g. self-hosted email → Microsoft 365).
- 5Retire: you discover an application is no longer used — you switch it off. The cheapest migration is the one you do not do.
- 6Retain: some workloads stay on-premises (latency, compliance, cost) — hybrid is a valid decision, not a failure.
A serious audit sorts each application into one of these categories before we touch anything. That is how you avoid paying to move things to the cloud that should never have moved.
TCO: compare properly, not just the server price
The cloud vs on-premises decision is not made by comparing the price of a server with that of a virtual machine. Total cost of ownership (TCO) includes things easily forgotten: power and cooling, licences, space, administrator time, hardware replacement every 4-5 years, downtime and the cost of a disaster without redundancy.
When you put all of this on the table, the picture changes. Sometimes the cloud clearly wins; other times, for stable and predictable workloads, on-premises remains cheaper. That is why we design your IT infrastructure architecture based on real TCO, not on fashion.
How to keep costs under control after migration
- Continuous right-sizing: adjust resources to actual consumption, not pessimistic estimates.
- Reservations and savings plans for stable workloads — 30-60% discounts versus on-demand pricing.
- Automatic shutdown of non-production environments outside working hours.
- Cost tags and dashboards (Grafana / Datadog) so you see exactly where every euro goes.
- Budget alerts that warn you before you overspend, not after.
The cloud is neither cheaper nor more expensive "in general". It costs exactly as much as how well you designed it.
Conclusion
A successful cloud migration does not mean moving everything as fast as possible, but consciously deciding what you move, how and why — based on TCO and the 6R framework. Companies that do this gain flexibility without losing cost control. If you are considering a migration or already have a cloud bill that worries you, let us talk for 30 minutes — I will tell you concretely where to start.