Control Azure Migration Costs

You’ve crafted your strategy, established governance, and prepared your landing zones. Now, it’s time to actualise your workloads. The Adopt phase of Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is where organisations migrate existing systems and initiate innovation using new cloud-native solutions.

This is an exhilarating stage, but it’s also when cloud expenses can quickly escalate if not vigilantly overseen. Throughout migration, workloads shift, environments overlap, and temporary resources can accumulate. Without ongoing visibility and control, your cloud expenditure could rapidly exceed your expectations.

This is where Turbo360 comes into play, ensuring your migration and innovation process remains transparent, optimised, and financially accountable.

Read through all the blogs in this series: Cloud Adoption Framework

The Adopt Phase of CAF: Implementing Migration and Innovation

During the Adopt phase, Microsoft’s framework prioritises:

• The migration of workloads from on-premises or other cloud platforms.
• The development of new cloud-native applications.
• The management of costs, security, and performance throughout the transition.
• The establishment of an operational model for ongoing improvement.

The primary challenge? Keeping control and visibility amidst rapid changes. Turbo360 helps you address this challenge by combining FinOps practices with operational flexibility, ensuring each migrated or newly created workload remains aligned with business objectives.

How Turbo360 Supports the Adopt Phase

Turbo360 enables teams to ensure that every step of migration and every innovation decision is financially transparent, accountable, and optimised in real-time. Here’s how:

Monitoring Costs in Real Time During Migration

CAF objective: Maintain oversight of costs, performance, and progress throughout migration.

Turbo360 solution:

• Utilise Cost Analyzer to track daily and cumulative expenditure as workloads transition to Azure.
• Compare forecasted and actual costs to verify adherence to migration budgets.
• Spot unexpected resource surges or duplicate environments created during testing.

Example: When migrating a finance application in phases, Turbo360 closely monitors incremental spending at each stage, enabling project managers to pinpoint when costs stabilise and what components are influencing deviations.

Avoiding “Lift-and-Spend” Through Optimisation Insights

CAF objective: Effectively modernise workloads, rather than merely relocating them.

Turbo360 solution:

• Employ Turbo360’s Optimisation Reports to pinpoint right-sizing opportunities after migration.
• Identify underutilised VMs, overlarge databases, or redundant storage left over after cutover.
• Implement automation schedules to tidy up test environments or idle resources once workloads are live.

Result: Rather than a simple “lift and shift” that inflates costs, you achieve a lift-and-optimize migration that leads to significant savings.

Keeping Innovation in Check

CAF objective: Empower developers to innovate without exceeding budgets.

Turbo360 solution:

• Establish Custom Scopes for each development team or innovation project, allowing cost accountability to be localised.
• Set up budget alerts and anomaly detection to warn teams before costs escalate.
• Integrate dashboards with DevOps workflows so developers can assess the financial impact of new features and enhancements early in the process, rather than only at go-live.

Tip: Link Turbo360 dashboards to your Azure DevOps or GitHub workflows, enabling product teams to visualise the cost implications as they deploy new features.

Automating Governance During Transition

CAF objective: Implement consistent governance policies throughout migration and development.

Turbo360 solution:

• Set up Automation & Scheduler to perform regular optimisation and governance tasks – for example, nightly scaling down of test resources.
• Utilise Tag Manager for tag remediation to ensure migrated assets meet organisational standards.
• Automatically register new resource groups or subscriptions into the relevant Turbo360 scopes for cost monitoring.

This approach guarantees that even amidst the hectic migration process, your environment remains consistent, tidy, and governed.

Fostering Executive Transparency

CAF objective: Offer measurable results to business stakeholders.

Turbo360 solution:

• Implement Executive Dashboards to display cost trends, migration progress, and ROI in real time.
• Generate automatic reports that summarise cost variances and resource usage.
• Align reporting perspectives with CAF’s “Monitor and Control” governance practices.

Outcome: Finance, IT, and leadership share consistent, reliable data, fostering confidence that your cloud journey is progressing on both a technical and financial level.

Real-World Application

A healthcare provider migrating numerous regional systems to Azure relied on Turbo360 throughout its Adopt phase:

• Cost Analyzer monitored migration costs against initial projections.
• Automation Scheduler deactivated staging environments outside of working hours.
• Anomaly Detection alerted the FinOps team to spikes caused by incorrectly configured backup settings.

By the completion of migration, they realised a 17% cost reduction compared to the initial baseline, all while maintaining performance and availability.

Importance of This Phase

Migration and innovation represent the most dynamic and costly components of the cloud journey. Without real-time cost monitoring and automated control, overspending can occur before you’re even aware of it.

Turbo360 provides you with:

• Complete transparency regarding migration expenses.
• Ongoing optimisation as workloads develop.
• Financial accountability for every innovation initiative.

It ensures that as you adopt Azure, you’re not just deploying workloads but doing so in a cost-efficient, governed, and value-generating manner.

Looking Ahead

Following migration and innovation comes Governance at scale, ensuring every workload remains compliant and optimised over time.

In Part 6 of this series, we’ll delve into: “Governance in Action: Turbo360 as the FinOps Engine Supporting CAF’s Governance Model.”

We’ll explore how Turbo360 provides continuous visibility, policy enforcement, and financial control during the CAF Govern phase.

Final Thoughts

Adopting Azure goes beyond migrating workloads; it’s about embracing responsible cloud management.

With Turbo360, you weave cost transparency and FinOps practices into every stage of adoption, empowering teams to innovate confidently while adhering to business guidelines.

“Migrate swiftly. Innovate wisely. Spend judiciously.”