These days, small businesses are facing the challenges of cloud migration. This technological shift and lack of skilled human resources in a small business environment make it difficult for business owners to stay abreast of the current technologies. However, with the support of Managed IT service providers, they can easily carry out this transition and run the business without worrying about day-to-day IT issues.

Here are a few tips to ensure solid cloud cost management and avoid scope creep:

Most often cloud users are dissatisfied because they don’t understand the purpose of moving to the cloud. “Every business is using cloud”, “I want to save money”, or “I don’t want to upgrade my infrastructure” aren’t enough reasons. It must be strategic. You should ask: Do I want to increase flexibility and scalability in my business? Can I improve data security and backup policy procedures through cloud migration?

You should be clear about what’s your purpose for cloud migration. It is essential to prepare a strategic plan to deal with the scope creep, achieve specific business goals, and ensure cloud cost management.

Planning is the key to optimize cloud migration and maximize its benefits. For instance, if your goal is to achieve cloud cost management, you need to predict as many variables as there could be. Lining up the variables upfront is like winning half the battle. Every aspect needs to be considered right from VMs, memory, disk space usage and VPNs to processors, redundancy, snapshots, replication, and LUN usage.

Since you can’t improve what you can’t measure, it is critical to perform a health check of current deployment with the aid of a managed IT service provider (MSPs). Once you have a detailed view, it would be easy to determine how each variable will act in a migratory environment.

Then, align these variables to your goals to optimize your cloud cost management.

Scope creep arises when the scope, deliverables, and features expand from what was originally set. Thus, to prevent scope creep, you need to have a reference-able and executable documentation. In fact, documentation is an integral part of the variable discovery and planning period. Once you devote enough time to consider all variables, document them, and align these variables to your strategic goals, you can ensure that the price structure of the cloud service model is predictably lower.