Cloud Migration Services
Move workloads to AWS, Azure, or GCP without freezing the business, with costed rehost, replatform, and retire calls.
Cloud migration is the work of moving your apps, data, and infrastructure onto AWS, Azure, or GCP without breaking what already works. Priced honestly, a lift-and-shift runs $3K to $8K per workload, a five-server shop lands near $15K, and complex environments with refactoring or compliance climb to $50K to $250K. The move itself does not save money; right-sizing, reserved pricing, and a cost-governance pass in the first 90 days do. Skip that discipline and the savings leak, because industry-wide 28% to 35% of cloud spend is wasted.
How we approach cloud migration services
A cloud migration goes wrong when it starts with a cutover date instead of a decision about what each workload actually needs. We sort your systems first: the ones worth rehosting as-is, the ones that should be replatformed on the way, and the few that cost less to retire than to move. Each call has a real cost multiplier behind it, not a vendor's best-case slide.
Then we move in waves, with the old environment still serving while each tranche cuts over, so no single weekend carries the whole business. We size the target for what you actually run instead of the headroom a sales rep wants to sell, and we watch the bill from the first workload, because a migration that doubles your monthly spend gets unwound at the next budget review.
In every engagement
Scope flexes to the problem, but these are the things you can count on us bringing.
- Workload inventory with rehost, replatform, and retire calls
- Costed migration plan with real cloud-spend projections
- Wave-based cutover that keeps the old environment running
- Right-sized target and a first-90-days cost-governance pass
Five ways to move a workload, and what each one costs you
Every workload gets one of five treatments. Picking wrong is where migration budgets blow up, so here is the honest read on effort against cost outcome.
| Approach | What moves | Effort | Cost outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rehost (lift-and-shift) | Server or VM moves as-is: same OS, same app, new home | Lowest | $3K to $8K per workload to move; cheapest path, but a lifted server nobody right-sizes often costs more than the datacenter did |
| Replatform | App moves with targeted swaps: managed database, container runtime, load balancer | Moderate | Higher than rehost; buys real operating savings without a full rewrite |
| Refactor / re-architect | App is rebuilt for the cloud: microservices, serverless, managed data tiers | Highest | This is modernization pricing wearing a migration badge: different multipliers, longer timeline |
| Repurchase (move to SaaS) | The app is retired and replaced with a SaaS product that does the job | Low to moderate | Trades a capital build for a subscription; cheapest long-run answer when the SaaS actually fits |
| Retire (decommission) | Workload is switched off and removed; nothing moves | Lowest | Pure saving, but the parallel-running bill ends only once the old gear is genuinely off |
Cost bands are 2026 industry figures from our cloud migration cost breakdown, not gmware quotes. Your number turns on workload count, data gravity, and the rehost-versus-refactor mix.
When migration is the right call
A vendor should be willing to talk you out of the work when the math says so. Here is where each path wins.
Stay on-prem, for now
When the servers are paid for, the load is flat, and nothing is expiring, the math can favor staying put. In a Barclays CIO survey, 86% of CIOs planned to move at least some workloads off public cloud, though only about 8% planned a full exit. Steady, license-heavy workloads on owned hardware are sometimes cheaper exactly where they sit.
Single-cloud migration
The right move for most teams. One provider means one bill, one security model, one set of skills to hire for. AWS and Azure list prices are broadly comparable on like-for-like compute and storage, so pick the cloud your team can actually operate. Misconfiguration costs more than any rate-card difference.
Multi-cloud
Worth the complexity for genuine regulatory, sovereignty, or acquisition reasons, or to escape a single-vendor lock that already burned you. Not worth it as insurance against an outage that rarely comes. Two clouds means double the tooling, double the expertise, and a cost picture twice as hard to govern.
Read the cost mechanics before you commit
The two guides our scoping calls lean on most: what a migration actually costs, and what changes when the data is regulated.
- Cloud Migration Cost for Small Business: 2026 Breakdown The per-workload menu, the five cost drivers, and the AWS MAP credits most small businesses never claim. Read the guide
- HIPAA Cloud Migration: What the 2027 Deadline Changes Mandatory MFA and encryption, the January 1, 2027 compliance date, and a 12-step plan with the BAA checkpoints. Read the guide
Questions buyers ask about cloud migration services
How much does cloud migration cost?
Build it from the workload up. Lift-and-shift runs $3K to $8K per workload, a five-server shop lands around $15K, and complex environments with refactoring or compliance run $50K to $250K. The hidden line is soft costs (training, cutover, decommissioning), which self-built budgets underestimate by 20% to 30%. We quote the assessment phase fixed-price so you learn your real number before committing.
AWS, Azure, or GCP, which should we pick?
On list price it is nearly a tie: most compute and storage is broadly comparable across AWS and Azure, usually within about 10%. Windows-heavy shops often do better on Azure, where the Hybrid Benefit lets you reuse existing Windows Server licenses to cut the Windows VM rate; Microsoft cites savings up to 40%, and up to about 80% stacked with Reserved Instances. GCP earns its spot when the roadmap is data and analytics. Past that, pick the cloud your team already understands, because misconfiguration costs more than any list-price gap.
Will moving to the cloud actually cut our bill?
It can. Post-migration infrastructure savings run up to 66%. But the savings come from right-sizing, reserved pricing, and switching off old gear, not the move itself. Industry-wide, 28% to 35% of cloud spend is wasted, and teams without FinOps discipline waste 32% to 40% against 15% to 20% for mature programs. Treat the migration as buying the option to save, and the first-90-days pass as exercising it.
How long does a migration take?
Two to six months end-to-end for most SMB environments. A few weeks of assessment and landing-zone setup, then workloads moved in waves with a smoke-test gate between each, then cutover and decommissioning. The decommission step is the one that slips, and it is exactly where the savings live, because until the old gear is off you pay for both stacks.
Industries we know well
The same service, sharpened by the regulations and realities of your sector.
Austin oversight, dual-shore delivery
We bring the move and the money under one roof: a costed plan for the migration and the FinOps discipline so the bill behaves afterward. An Austin-based architect owns the workload inventory, the landing-zone design, and the code-review gates from our office at 5900 Balcones Drive. Engineers in Bangalore and Mohali run the workload waves at dual-shore economics, overlapping three to four hours of your day. You sign a US contract under US law, and we hold the decommission gate even when it is unpopular, because that is where the savings actually land.
Nervous before a migration, or part-way through one that stalled? Tell us what you are running: server count, data size, anything with a compliance label on it. We will come back within 48 hours with a workload-priced estimate and a straight read on scope, cost, and timeline. If the honest answer is to harden in place or stay put, we will say so. For the architecture and cost-governance layer above the move, see our cloud consulting service; our cybersecurity and DevOps and infrastructure teams plug into the same engagement when the work needs them.
See it on your own data.
Book a 30-minute demo. We'll walk through Shield Suite with your use case in mind.