The real cost of cloud migration nobody puts in the proposal

Cloud migration proposals are usually built around infrastructure cost comparisons — but the real cost of migration shows up after go-live, in the operational work nobody budgeted for.

Data egress fees, re-architecting monolithic workloads that do not lift-and-shift cleanly, and the retraining required for internal teams to operate the new environment are the line items that quietly blow past initial estimates.

Our advice: budget at least 20% of the migration cost for post-go-live optimization and training, and phase the migration around workloads that will show early wins.