Shrinking budgets pose tremendous challenge to organizations with their digital transformation initiatives and cloud adoption roadmap. Technology decision makers must decide what to do with legacy applications that have proliferated prior to the pandemic. There are three main choices available: maintain the status quo and do nothing, migrate and modernize the applications to a modern cloud-based environment or rewrite and replace them. The last one might be tempting given the various capabilities introduced by both AWS and Azure and refreshed knowledge base about the application to be transformed but lift-and-shift costs have been brought down by both the clouds.

As a specific example, significant cost savings can be achieved with just migrating legacy ASP.Net applications from on-premises to the cloud. Traditional .NET applications are well poised for migration by virtue of the .NET runtime on which they run. Azure has claims to provide savings of up to 54% over running applications on-premises and 35% over running them on AWS as per their media reports. Streamlined operations, simplified administration and proximity are the other additional benefits. Built-in tools from Visual Studio and MSSQL provide convenience to migrations for applications and databases respectively.

One of the key differences between the migrations to either public cloud is the offering for Hybrid Benefit from Azure. The Hybrid Benefit is a licensing offer that helps migration to Azure by applying existing licenses to Windows Azure, SQL Server and Linux subscriptions that can realize substantial cost savings. Additionally, services like Azure Arc help to use Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Stack for Hyperconverged clustering solution to run virtualized workloads on-premises which makes it easy to consolidate aging infrastructure and connect to Azure for cloud services.

Another difference between the migrations to either public cloud is the offering of a calculator to calculate Total Cost of Ownership by Azure. The TCO calculator helps to understand the cost areas that affect the current applications today such as server hardware, software licenses, electricity and labor. It recommends a set of equivalent services in Azure that will support the applications. The analysis shows each cost area with an estimate of the on-premises spending versus the spending in Azure. There are several cost categories that either decrease or go away completely when moving workloads to the cloud. Finally, it helps to create a customized business case to justify migration to Azure. All it takes is a set of three steps: enter a few details about the current infrastructure, review the assumptions and receive a summary with supporting analysis.

The only limitation that an organization faces is one that is self-imposed. Organizations and big company departments might be averse to their employees increasing their cloud budget to anything beyond a thousand dollars a month. This is not the only gap. Business owners cite those existing channels of supply and demand are becoming savvy in their competition with the cloud while the architects do not truly enforce the right practice to keep the overall budget of cloud computing expenses to be under a limit. Employees and resource users are being secured by role-based access control but the privilege to manage subscriptions is granted to those users which allows them to disproportionately escalate costs.

When this is overcome, the benefits outweigh the costs and apprehension.