There is no single price for a cloud migration. A small organisation moving a handful of applications and a global enterprise moving hundreds of systems have very different costs. This article explains what drives the price so you can budget with confidence.
The main cost drivers
Migration cost is mostly driven by how much there is to move and how complicated it is.
- Number and size of workloads: servers, databases, applications and the data volume behind them.
- Migration approach: moving as-is is cheaper up front than re-architecting for cloud-native services.
- Dependencies: tightly coupled legacy systems take longer to untangle and test.
- Security and compliance requirements: regulated sectors need more design, evidence and testing.
- Downtime tolerance: near-zero downtime migrations need more planning and parallel running.
- Your team's skills: if your team can't support the new environment, training or managed support adds to the budget.
Consultancy day rates
Most cloud consultancy is priced per day. At Baywater Consulting our average day rate is around £700, though the right figure depends on the seniority and skills the work needs. The total cost is then day rate multiplied by the effort the project needs, which is why a proper assessment comes before a quote.
Be wary of a fixed price quoted without any discovery work. Either the supplier has padded it to cover risk, or the scope will change later and the price will rise.
Costs people forget
Budget for these as well as the migration itself.
- Running costs in the cloud: you pay for compute, storage and data transfer every month.
- Running old and new environments in parallel during cutover.
- Testing, including performance and security testing.
- Training your team and updating runbooks.
- Ongoing support and cost optimisation after go-live.
How to keep the cost under control
Start with a short assessment of your estate to find out what you really have. Migrate in waves, beginning with low-risk workloads, so you learn before the complex systems move. Right-size resources instead of copying on-premises server specifications, and put cost monitoring in place from day one. Our cloud financial management service exists for exactly this.
Getting a realistic quote
The fastest route to a realistic number is a short discovery conversation. Tell us what you run today, what you want to achieve and your timescales, and we will give you an honest view of the effort involved. Public sector buyers can also procure our services through G-Cloud 15.