Ways to Achieve Cost Savings in Cloud Migration

Cloud migration has evolved from a “nice-to-have IT initiative” into a core business strategy that organizations pursue to increase agility, reduce operational costs, and modernize legacy environments. But the way companies migrate, and why they migrate, has changed dramatically over the past few years.

In 2025, cloud adoption is being driven not only by cost savings, but also by competitive pressure, security requirements, and the urgent need to support AI-enabled operations. According to Gartner, over 65% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by 2027, up from just 35% in 2022.
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At the same time, McKinsey reports that companies accelerating cloud migration can reduce infrastructure costs by 20–40%, while improving time-to-market by up to 50%, especially when modernization is paired with automation and FinOps practices.

These benefits explain why cloud modernization remains one of the most resilient areas of IT investment, even as organizations tighten budgets heading into 2026.

The Migration Strategies Still Matter but the Goals Have Shifted

The classic migration approaches remain the same, but companies are applying them more strategically:

1. Lift and Shift (Rehost): Still the fastest way to reduce data center costs, but now often used as a bridge to deeper modernization.
2. Replatforming: Making lightweight adjustments to take advantage of cloud features (managed databases, autoscaling, container services). This approach has surged in popularity because it delivers quick wins without high refactoring costs.
3. Refactoring: Re-architecting applications into microservices or serverless models. As AI workloads become more prevalent, more enterprises are shifting toward refactoring to improve resilience, elasticity, and cost efficiency.
4. Hybrid and Multicloud Architectures: Hybrid environments have become the norm, not the exception. A 2025 Flexera report found that 89% of enterprises run hybrid or multicloud environments, balancing risk, performance, and regulatory needs.

Why Cloud Migration Is Surging Again in 2025–2026

Beyond cost savings, three major trends are pushing companies to accelerate cloud transformation:

AI adoption requires scalable cloud infrastructure: Data-heavy workloads, AI model training, and automation pipelines can’t run efficiently in aging on-prem environments.

Security and compliance pressures are rising: Cloud providers now offer built-in compliance frameworks that reduce organizational risk and exposure.

Legacy technical debt is becoming financially unsustainable: Gartner estimates that legacy systems will cost enterprises twice as much to operate and maintain by 2027.

Still, Cloud Migration Needs to Be Cost-Controlled to Deliver ROI

While cloud offers enormous potential savings, mismanaged migrations frequently lead to cost overruns. A 2024 KPMG survey revealed that 79% of cloud initiatives exceed their expected budgets, primarily because organizations underestimate migration complexity and fail to optimize workloads post-migration.

This is why cost minimization, from architecture decisions to licensing to resource sizing, remains a foundational pillar of successful cloud transformation.

And that’s where the rest of the blog will guide the reader: how to achieve meaningful, sustainable cost savings throughout the migration journey.

Assessing Your Existing Infrastructure

A successful cloud migration doesn’t start in the cloud; it starts with understanding what you already have. In 2025–2026, assessing your existing infrastructure is one of the highest-impact cost-saving steps you can take. Companies that skip this phase typically face delays, unexpected rework, and far higher cloud bills. This isn’t just theory. Industry reports consistently show that organizations struggle most when they move workloads before they’re ready:

• In the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report, 84% of organizations say managing cloud spend is their top cloud challenge, and poor pre-migration planning is one of the primary causes.
• Hybrid and multicloud adoption continue to rise, making upfront workload analysis even more important. Many organizations now distribute workloads across multiple clouds to optimize performance and cost.
• Analysts highlight that cloud migrations often run into trouble because companies underestimate dependencies, data transfer needs, and application readiness.

In short: a thorough assessment is your first real cost-optimization opportunity.

Start With a Deep Look at Current Usage

On-premises environments often hide a surprising amount of waste:

• Idle or lightly used servers
• Oversized VMs
• Unused storage volumes
• Forgotten workloads
• Applications running below their performance capacity

The cloud makes all of this visible. but only if you assess it first. Right-sizing your workloads before migration helps prevent paying cloud prices for resources you don’t actually need.

Evaluate Performance Requirements, Not Just Infrastructure Specs

A common mistake is mapping existing server sizes directly to cloud instances. But in the cloud, performance is tied to:

• Bursting capabilities
• Autoscaling
• Storage tiers
• Network throughput
• Container or serverless options

Matching workloads to the right performance tier is essential for cost control.

Evaluate Cloud Providers by Fit, Not Just Features

Choosing a cloud provider isn’t just about checking which services they offer. It’s about aligning providers to workload needs and cost expectations. Recent trends show:

• Organizations are increasingly multicloud (AWS + Azure, or Azure + GCP, etc.) to reduce lock-in and optimize cost/performance.
• Each provider offers a growing suite of AI-ready services, managed databases, automated scaling tools, and security frameworks. Understanding these differentiators early ensures you don’t overpay for capabilities you don’t need.

A good assessment maps each workload to several provider options, comparing performance, cost, security, compliance needs, and integration complexity.

Review Licensing Early; It Can Make or Break Cost Savings

Licensing is one of the most commonly overlooked sources of cloud overspend. In 2025, major software vendors (including Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, VMware, and others) continue to adjust licensing models for cloud deployments. Common licensing pitfalls include:

• Additional fees for cloud-based deployments
• Incompatibility of existing perpetual licenses with cloud environments
• Double-charging due to misunderstandings in BYOL (Bring Your Own License) rules
• Increased annual costs after cloud migration

Skipping a licensing review often leads to budget surprises shortly after workloads go live.

Understand Application Dependencies and Constraints

Modern organizations run interconnected systems. Moving one application without understanding its dependencies can cause:

• Outages
• Latency issues
• Broken integrations
• Unplanned rollback work
• Prolonged migration timelines

Many cloud migrations face delays because teams don’t fully identify dependencies beforehand. Dependency mapping should uncover:

• Applications that require shared databases
• Workloads that must migrate together
• Legacy OS or middleware constraints
• Applications better suited for SaaS replacement than migration
• Systems that should be retired altogether to avoid unnecessary cloud costs

Plan Data Migration Early; It’s One of the Most Expensive Parts

Data migration isn’t just a technical task, it’s a financial one. Hidden costs come from:

• Cloud egress or transfer fees
• Large-scale initial data seeding
• Continuous replication during cutover
• Bandwidth limitations that prolong migration windows
• High-frequency storage options accidentally used

Cloud providers offer calculators to estimate these costs, but many organizations don’t use them until late in the process, when it’s too late to adjust strategy. Data migration planning should answer:

• What data needs to move now?
• What can be archived, compressed, or deleted?
• What transfer method minimizes cost (online migration, physical appliance, staged migration)?
• How long will the migration window be?
• How will we validate data integrity after transfer?

Choosing the Right Cloud Platform and Services

Choosing a cloud provider used to be about comparing feature lists. In 2025–2026, it’s about choosing a long-term strategic partner that aligns with your workloads, budget, security needs, and modernization roadmap.

With the rapid rise of AI-assisted operations, multicloud adoption, and global cost pressures, selecting the right platform is now one of the biggest levers for cost optimization and performance.

Choosing the right provider and the right mix of services can make the difference between a migration that delivers ROI and one that compounds technical debt.

Start With Business Needs, Not Technology

A successful cloud strategy begins by mapping what the business needs to achieve:

• Is the goal to reduce data center spend?
• Improve application performance?
• Support AI and automation initiatives?
• Strengthen global availability and redundancy?
• Modernize legacy workloads that hold the business back?

Cloud isn’t one-size-fits-all anymore; it’s one-size-per-workload.

Evaluate Cloud Providers Through Practical Capability Lenses

Instead of comparing hundreds of features, compare categories that materially influence migration success:

1. Compute Pricing Models: Cloud waste often comes from choosing the wrong pricing tier

2. Storage Tiers & Lifecycle Policies: Most enterprises overpay for storage by keeping all data in high-performance tiers.

3. AI & ML Readiness: AI workloads are now a migration driver, and each provider has strengths in different areas.

4. Security & Compliance: Rather than rebuilding security on your own, cloud-native options can accelerate compliance:

• Identity management
• Encryption by default
• Compliance frameworks
• Threat detection & monitoring

All major providers publish compliance mappings to HIPAA, ISO, SOC 2, PCI, and others.

5. Global Availability & Multiregion Options: This matters for businesses with:

• International customers
• Local data residency requirements
• High availability expectations

6. Cost Management & Monitoring Tools: Providers now ship built-in cost monitoring and policy enforcement tools:

• AWS Cost Explorer
• Azure Cost Management + Advisor
• GCP Cost Recommender

These tools help catch anomalies early, if you choose the provider that fits your transparency needs.

Plan for Integration, Not Just Migration

Many cloud initiatives stall not because the cloud provider is wrong, but because integration planning was overlooked.

Organizations must evaluate:

• How easily on-prem systems will connect to the cloud
• Whether identity management integrates cleanly
• How databases will sync during cutover
• Whether legacy workloads need middleware or refactoring to operate in the new environment
• How to maintain consistent security controls across hybrid environments

Skipping integration planning can lead to delays, cost spikes, or even temporary rollbacks.

Don’t Forget Cost Modeling…It Changes Everything

Choosing the “right cloud” often comes down to one thing: cost modeling accuracy. You should model:

• Compute usage patterns
• Storage tiers and growth
• Data transfer volumes (ingress/egress)
• Licensing implications
• Reserved vs on-demand pricing
• Scaling needs
• Regional cost differences

Why? Because two providers may offer the same technical capabilities but differ by 20–40% in operational cost over 3–5 years, depending on the workload mix.

Managing Data Migration (2025–2026 Revamp, OCI-Focused Narrative Edition)

If cloud migration were a novel, data migration would be the chapter where everything suddenly gets real. Up until now, teams can talk strategy, compare architectures, and sketch out their cloud vision. But once data begins to move, the systems, history, and knowledge that keep the business running, the stakes rise.

For organizations migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), data migration is not just a technical milestone; it is the moment the cloud becomes operational reality. And when done right, it sets the tone for long-term cost savings, performance gains, and smoother adoption of Oracle workloads.

Start With What Matters: Prioritize the Data That Runs Your Business

OCI migrations often involve mission-critical Oracle workloads: ERP, databases, financial systems, and custom applications tied deeply to the business. This makes prioritization essential.

The most successful migration programs classify data into categories:

• “Critical on Day 1” – Oracle Databases, EBS, Fusion integrations, customer data, operational systems
• “Important but flexible” – reporting layers, analytics datasets, backup repositories
• “Move later or retire” – archived logs, obsolete tables, stale datasets

This prevents teams from moving unnecessary data to OCI and helps control storage and replication costs early on.

Understand the Cost Curve: OCI Data Transfer & Storage Economics

One of OCI’s strengths is its straightforward, lower-cost data transfer model compared to other large clouds. But even with favorable pricing, teams must still plan for:

• Initial migration data loads
• Ongoing data replication
• Cross-region transfers
• Backup and DR traffic
• Archive strategies

Here are relevant OCI resources:

• OCI Data Transfer Overview (online & appliance options)
• OCI Pricing Model (including storage & bandwidth)

Many teams do not realize how large datasets affect timelines and budgets until late in planning. OCI offers tools like Data Transfer Appliance, Data Integration, and FastConnect that can dramatically reduce both time and cost, but only when chosen early in the design process.

Smart OCI migrations use a blended approach:

• Online migration for lighter datasets
• Data Transfer Appliance for multi-terabyte loads
• Data lifecycle policies to push cold data directly into OCI Archive Storage
• FastConnect for high-throughput, predictable networking

These choices often save companies 20–40% on migration-related operational overhead, depending on dataset size and required replication cycles.

Testing: The Make-or-Break Phase for OCI Migrations

Whether you’re migrating Oracle Databases, E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, or bespoke apps, the testing phase determines if your migration feels effortless, or painful. OCI migration leaders follow a disciplined three-layer testing approach:

1. Component Testing: Ensuring DB schemas, batch jobs, integrations, and core app components operate correctly in OCI.

2. Integration Testing: Validating that applications communicate seamlessly using:

• OCI Networking
• Load Balancers
• Object Storage
• Autonomous Database or Exadata Cloud Service

Teams check latency, throughput, and error handling, especially critical for Oracle-heavy workloads.

3. User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Business users validate performance, workflows, and reporting accuracy inside OCI. The organizations that avoid unplanned outages or rollbacks are the ones that treat testing as a business exercise, not just an engineering task.

Automated Deployment: OCI Makes This Easier Than Ever

OCI offers several tools that help automate deployment and reduce migration complexity:

• Resource Manager (Terraform-based) – infrastructure-as-code deployment
• Oracle Cloud Migrations Service – automates discovery, replication & cutover
• Oracle GoldenGate – real-time data synchronization with minimal downtime
• Cloud Shell + CI/CD pipelines – for automated testing and rollout workflows

These OCI-native tools dramatically reduce human error and support blue–green or canary test patterns, giving teams the confidence to execute cutovers without fear.

Automated deployment ensures:

• Consistent environments
• Quicker rollback if needed
• Repeatable processes across waves
• Faster stabilization after migration

Plan Your “Safety Net”: Rollback & Recovery

Even the cleanest migration plans face surprises: a database behaving differently under new IOPS constraints, an integration pointing to the wrong endpoint, or a legacy workload experiencing unexpected latency.

OCI organizations build in safety nets:

• Data Guard or Autonomous Data Guard for near-zero-data-loss recovery
• Snapshots and backups across Object Storage or Block Volumes
• GoldenGate replication to allow staged cutovers
• Rollback scripts and runbooks inside Resource Manager
• Parallel on-prem + OCI environments during transitional phases

Streamlining Testing & Deployment

If data migration is the turning point of a cloud project, then testing and deployment are the big reveal, the moment when applications finally run in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and the business sees what the future looks like.

But this is also where migrations are most vulnerable. A missed dependency, a misaligned configuration, or an overlooked integration can quickly turn excitement into setbacks. In 2025–2026, organizations succeeding in OCI migrations are the ones who treat testing and deployment as a precision craft, not a checklist.

Let’s walk through how modern teams streamline this critical phase.

Testing Is the Backbone of a Successful Migration

The businesses that transition smoothly into OCI are the ones who understand that testing begins long before cutover and continues well after. The process isn’t linear; it’s cyclical and layered.

1. Conduct Thorough, Early Testing to Avoid Surprises: Many migration issues appear only when systems begin operating in the cloud:

• Network traffic patterns change
• Latency behaves differently
• Security policies enforce differently
• Integrations expect routing rules that no longer exist
• Applications reveal hidden dependencies

This is why modern guidance emphasizes early and iterative testing cycles. For context, industry analysis shows cloud migrations frequently fail due to inadequate testing and dependency mapping efforts.

OCI customers typically validate:

• Database performance on Autonomous Database or Exadata Cloud Service
• Application behavior via OCI Load Balancing
• Cross-service calls using OCI API Gateway
• Storage throughput via OCI Block Volume and Object Storage

At this stage, performance anomalies don’t mean something is wrong; they mean you’ve caught the issue in time.

2. Automate Deployment Wherever Possible: Automation is the guardrail that prevents errors during high-pressure migration windows.

OCI provides several automation-first pathways:

• OCI Resource Manager (Terraform-based IaC): Enables infrastructure-as-code deployments with rollback support.
• Oracle Cloud Migrations Service: Automates discovery, replication, wave planning, and cutover.
• Oracle GoldenGate: Supports near-zero-downtime migrations with real-time data synchronization.
• DevOps Service & Cloud Shell: Let teams build CI/CD pipelines to streamline deployments and enforce consistency.

Automation replaces manual steps with predictable, repeatable actions.
This leads to:

• Faster deployments
• Fewer configuration mistakes
• Easier rollback
• Auditable, repeatable migrations
• Faster stabilization post go-live

In other words, automation turns chaos into choreography.

3. Build for Rollback & Recovery Because Migration Is Never 100% Predictable: Even with a flawless plan, something unexpected will surface during deployment:

• A job runs slower in the new environment
• A connection string points to an old endpoint
• A custom integration wasn’t replicated correctly
• User roles didn’t map one-to-one

OCI provides several features that make rollback and recovery smoother:

• Data Guard / Autonomous Data Guard for high-availability protection
• Block Volume backups & snapshots for rapid recovery
• GoldenGate replication for reversible cutovers
• Resource Manager stack rollback when IaC deployments fail

Rollback plans bring confidence, and confidence brings speed. Teams deploy faster when they know they have a safe exit route.

Deployment Doesn’t End at Cutover; It Begins a Stabilization Period

After deployment, high-performing teams monitor applications closely during the stabilization window (typically 2–6 weeks), watching:

• Performance vs. baseline
• Database query execution times
• Integration call success rates
• Cost anomalies
• Network throughput
• Logging & error patterns

OCI’s Observability and Management services help capture these signals.

Cloud migration isn’t just a technical milestone

It’s a transformation of how the business works, scales, and competes. And in 2025–2026, organizations embracing OCI are finding that modernization doesn’t have to be risky or cost-prohibitive. When migration is planned with precision, executed with automation, and guided by Oracle-aligned expertise, it becomes an opportunity to unlock faster performance, stronger resilience, and meaningful cost savings.

Every phase we explored, from assessing infrastructure, to choosing the right cloud services, to orchestrating data movement, testing, and deployment, contributes to a migration that is not only successful but strategically advantageous. OCI gives organizations the tools to modernize mission-critical workloads, optimize spending, and support future innovation, including AI, analytics, and automation.

But technology alone isn’t enough. Behind every smooth migration is a methodology, a strategy, and a partner who understands how to bring the pieces together without disrupting the business. With deep expertise in Oracle ecosystems, IT Convergence helps organizations modernize confidently, avoid common pitfalls, and accelerate the path to operational excellence in OCI.

Migration doesn’t just move systems. It moves the business forward.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What makes OCI a strong choice for enterprise cloud migration?
   OCI is optimized for performance, cost efficiency, and security, especially for Oracle workloads. It offers predictable pricing, powerful automation tools, and high availability for mission-critical systems.

2. How does data migration impact total cloud migration cost?
   Data transfer, replication, and storage can significantly affect cost. Planning early (and using OCI tools like Data Transfer Appliance or lifecycle policies) reduces unnecessary expense.

3. Why is testing so important during migration?
   Testing prevents outages, ensures integrations work, and validates performance. OCI automation and monitoring tools help identify issues early and ensure a smooth cutover.

4. Can OCI help reduce long-term operational costs?
   Yes. OCI offers cost-saving features like flexible compute pricing, autonomous services, integrated monitoring, and storage tiering, all designed to reduce operational overhead.