Cloud migration: where the savings are and where the money goes
Published:
Migrating to cloud can cut IT costs, but not automatically and not by a percentage anyone can promise in advance. What can be said with a source is how much gets wasted after the migration — and the figure is large.
Correction note (August 2026): this article previously stated that "a Flexera report shows an average saving of 30% of the IT budget" and that a chaotic migration "increases costs by 35%". Flexera's State of the Cloud report does not measure savings achieved by migrating; it measures wasted cloud spend — we had attached the source to a claim it does not support. Both figures are removed, and the one the report does publish is kept.
Where do savings come from?
- Hardware elimination — physical servers, UPS, cooling, dedicated space
- Pay-as-you-go — pay only for what you use, scale instantly
- Reduced maintenance IT staff — cloud provider handles uptime
- Included disaster recovery — automatic backup, geographic failover
The trap: cloud sprawl
The #1 problem for companies in cloud is cloud sprawl — resources started and forgotten. Flexera reports in its 2026 State of the Cloud Report (18 March 2026) that 29% of cloud spend is wasted — the first rise in that figure after five years of decline, attributed to new AI workloads. Source: Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud Report.
In practice: close to one euro in three spent on cloud produces nothing — idle VMs, unused storage, redundant licences. This is where the saving is won or lost, not in the decision to migrate itself.
Pre-migration checklist
- Application audit — what to migrate, rewrite, or keep on-premise
- Cost estimation — 3-year TCO calculator (cloud vs on-premise)
- Security assessment — access control, data encryption, GDPR compliance
- Phased migration plan — not everything at once, app by app
- Monitoring & alerting — cost dashboard with overspend alerts
We offer complete cloud migration consulting — from audit to implementation and ongoing cost optimization.