Planning and forecasting

If the workload you bring to your cloud environment is a new cloud native based workload, or a migration from your on-premises data center you need to model and plan costs. Using cloud native tools, you can extract data that will allow you to determine a total cost of ownership (TCO) to quantify the expected cloud costs. Additionally, for your overall environment, there are other non-cost cloud values that you need to consider, including staff productivity, operational resiliency, and business agility, which will showcase the business value of moving to the cloud.

We recommend regularly reviewing cloud budgets, to understand different variances, so you can plan ahead for spending. We also recommend performing forecasting exercises to define future IT and workload-based budgets. Cloud forecasting can be performed by using a combination of trend-based, and driver-based methods to closely align to future cloud usage (such as, new products, new launches, or changes in cloud deployments) as well as future cloud demand (such as, forecasted customer demand for cloud-hosted products). Cloud spend planning should be a part of the organization’s overall IT financial planning process, which may include on-premises or other hybrid spend planning.