Cloud Migration Business Case: On-Prem TCO, Workload Waves, Dual-Running Costs, Licence Changes & Payback

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Add up everything today's server room costs per year, from hardware spread over its life to the staff time, and break it down to a cost per server per month: the number every cloud offer must beat.
• Size eight workloads from their measured peak use plus headroom, pick the smallest fictional cloud size that fits both CPU and RAM with an approximate XLOOKUP, and price the gain over a like-for-like copy.
• Turn four rules into one IFS formula that picks an approach for every workload, see why the order of the rules matters, and count workloads and effort days per approach.
• Plan four migration waves: cut-over dates in working days around change-freeze days, servers per wave with SUMIFS, the buffer before the data-centre contract ends and the pace each wave needs.
• Cost the months in which a wave runs in the cloud and on-prem at the same time, add them up with SUMPRODUCT, and see what switching the old servers off sooner would save.
• Apply fictional licence-mobility rules to six products, price the early end of a support contract and the monthly compute bill when 70 % is covered by a discounted commitment.
• Compare five years of staying on-prem with five years in the cloud, turn the difference into net savings, and judge the move with the cumulative saving, NPV, IRR and the payback month.
• Rebuild the business case as one NPV formula with an annuity factor, run seven scenarios, find the cloud price at which the move stops paying off and chart the NPV per scenario.