Written by: Deeba Kamran
Deeba Kamran is a tech reviewer and writer obsessed with finding the best tools for the modern world. From hardware to SaaS, she delivers clear, actionable insights into the products and services shaping our digital future.
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Introduction

This article is part of our Cloud Architecture & Migration resource section.

For many businesses, the main reason to migrate to another cloud can be to lower overall operational costs. Therefore, the data migration journey itself should not be higher. Sure, there are free migration tools, but they do not migrate permissions, timestamps, and other features that are critical for operations continuity and efficiency.

Cost planning should begin with a clear understanding of the destination environment and its technical requirements. Learning how to build cloud architecture for your business can help teams select suitable services, estimate resource requirements and avoid paying for unnecessary capacity.

Here are five ways businesses of all sizes (including enterprises, SMBs, and MSPs) can ensure the overall cloud data migration cost does not go high.

1. Finalizing the Scope of Work First

One of the crucial steps to keeping the migration cost in check is to finalize the scope of the work. For example, when migrating Google Drive to OneDrive, it is crucial to plan and finalize the features to migrate, such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, sharing permissions, timestamps, comments, embedded links, and external shares.

It is after finalizing the scope of work that it becomes easier for the financial team to get accurate pricing from the migration partner. And the more accurate and specific the pricing, the better the clarity of the overall expense involved in the migration project.

Businesses that need professional support should compare the responsibilities, deliverables and pricing included with different infrastructure migration services. A clearly defined service agreement can prevent unexpected charges and confusion about which migration tasks are covered.

2. Understand the Overage Charges of Migrating File Versions

Migrating file versions causes the overall data size to increase in the destination cloud, especially for specific source and destination cloud combinations such as Box to SharePoint and OneDrive. If you plan to migrate file versions, it is a much to check with the migration partner and learn about the data size increase and the overage charges.

Generally, the overage charges will be higher if you plan to migrate all file versions, and they will be lesser for migrating selective versions.

Organizations can reduce the amount of transferred data by reviewing duplicate documents, outdated versions and unnecessary folders before starting the project. A structured process to migrate files between cloud services can also help preserve important information while avoiding repeated or incomplete transfers.

3. Finalizing the Commercial Agreement Before the Project Kick-off

Businesses of all sizes must finalize the commercial agreement before initiating the actual data migration. Moving forward with the project only after confirming the pricing and payment terms will help ensure that there are no extra or unforeseen costs in the later stages.

It also becomes easier to move the project quickly after finalizing the commercial agreement and sending it over to the finance team.

4. Understand the Extra Charges of Custom Requirements

Similar to migrating file versions, having custom migration requirements, e.g., migrating specific external links or embedded links, will add extra charges to the overall migration project expense. It is crucial for IT admins and teams to work with the migration partner to evaluate the complexity of the custom requirement and the additional cost.

In many cases, developing and deploying custom features will have a reasonable cost if the framework is readily available for the migration partner. However, the cost can go high if the migration partner must develop the feature from scratch.

Custom requirements are often more complex when workloads and information are distributed across several providers. Reviewing the key considerations for managing multi-cloud environments can help businesses anticipate expenses related to integration, security, monitoring and centralized administration.

5. Deleting or Archiving Source Cloud Data That Is Not Useful

One simple yet effective way to keep the overall cloud data migration project’s cost in check is to delete or archive data in the source cloud that is no longer needed.

During the pre-migration analysis stage, you can segregate the source cloud data into useful and non-useful categories. After that, put the useful data category into the migration pipeline and label the non-useful category as data to be archived or deleted altogether.

This assessment becomes even more important when a project includes physical servers, databases, applications and networking systems. Understanding the complete data center migration process can help organizations estimate costs, identify dependencies and organize workloads into manageable migration stages.