Cloud migrations often promise cost savings. But without proper planning, they can do the opposite. We walk through the five most expensive mistakes we see and how to avoid them.
Lift-and-shift was supposed to be the fast path to the cloud. For many South African enterprises, it became the fast path to a larger monthly bill with the same operational headaches.
Here are the five mistakes we see most often — and what to do instead.
1. Migrating without refactoring
Moving a monolith unchanged to VMs in the cloud rarely delivers value. You're paying for elasticity you can't use and redundancy you haven't architected for. Assess each workload: rehost, replatform, or rebuild.
2. Ignoring data egress costs
Cloud pricing looks attractive until you model data transfer between regions, out to on-premise systems, or across services. Map your data flows before signing off on architecture.
3–5. Governance, skills, and exit strategy
Skipping FinOps governance leads to sprawl. Underestimating the skills gap means expensive consultants indefinitely. And no exit strategy means vendor lock-in by accident.
A successful migration starts with a business case, not a vendor workshop. Define success metrics — cost, performance, resilience, and team capability — and measure against them monthly.
Written by Sipho Mabhena
Khemo IT Solutions