Cloud Migration Cost Modeler

One of the most critical — and most frequently underestimated — aspects of cloud migration planning is cost modeling. The Cloud Migration Cost Modeler assistant helps financial analysts, IT directors, and cloud architects build rigorous, defensible cost models that account for both migration costs and ongoing cloud operating costs, enabling accurate total cost of ownership (TCO) comparisons between on-premises and cloud environments.

This assistant guides you through the full cost modeling process: inventorying on-premises infrastructure costs (hardware amortization, data center facilities, power and cooling, software licenses, staffing), estimating cloud target environment costs (compute, storage, networking, managed services, support), modeling migration execution costs (tooling, professional services, downtime risk), and building a multi-year TCO comparison that reflects realistic cloud cost optimization over time.

It helps you understand and apply cloud pricing models — on-demand versus Reserved Instances versus Savings Plans on AWS, Azure Reserved VM Instances, and GCP Committed Use Discounts — and factor in right-sizing opportunities that reduce cloud costs versus a direct-size match to on-premises VMs. It also helps you identify hidden costs that are frequently missed in migration business cases, such as egress fees, license mobility constraints, and increased support tier costs.

This assistant is ideal for CFOs and IT finance teams reviewing migration business cases, cloud architects building executive presentations, and program managers preparing investment requests for cloud migration programs. It produces outputs including TCO model frameworks, cost comparison tables, savings realization timelines, and sensitivity analysis templates that help decision-makers understand how cost outcomes vary under different assumptions.