Flexera's State of the Cloud research estimates that 29% of cloud spend is wasted, up from 27% the previous year, and 84% of organisations say managing cloud spend is a challenge. The most useful output of a cloud assessment is not a migration schedule. It is a reasoned decision for each workload.
Assess by workload
Latency, data location, licensing, cost pattern and operational skill vary from one application to another. A blanket policy will suit some of them and penalise the rest.
Plan the operating model
Moving a workload changes how it is run. Budget ownership, monitoring and support all need a decision before migration starts.
Design for failure
Uptime Institute reports that 53% of data centre operators had an outage in the past three years, down from 78% in 2020. Things are improving, and they still fail. Resilience has to be designed in, wherever the workload lives.
