Moving from a Legacy to a Modern Data Platform: Cost Effective or Not?

There are many speculations surrounding the transition and upgrade to the cloud. Some have said that this may not necessarily result in cost savings and that in some scenarios, a company may end up spending even more than when they had run things on-premises. The true benefit, some have said, lies more in other areas: flexibility, agility, elasticity, etc.

However, in the case of the data platform, we have helped customers who specifically had the objective of reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for their data estate over time. There is a quantifiable reduction of costs incurred when moving to a modern data platform.

The Proof is in the Pudding

For one of our large customers in the utilities industry, they were able to take their 5-year TCO down from $1M to $200K – a huge amount of savings, by transitioning from their legacy databases to a Microsoft SQL Server. Cost reduction was achieved in the following areas:

Legacy database vendor support and maintenance

On-premises datacenter costs such as hardware upgrades and support, virtualization costs, electricity, networking, storage and IT staff

How do you know if you too can experience lower TCO?

Ask your provider for evidence of cost reduction in actual customer implementations. If this is not available, there are also TCO calculators that can help you estimate potential savings and assess whether the move from legacy databases to a modern data platform will make sense. One of these is the Microsoft Azure TCO Calculator available here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/tco/

If you need assistance with determining whether migrating to a new data platform is the best move for your business, in terms of not just cost savings but taking advantage of the latest database technology and innovations, then NTT DATA can help you with an assessment of your existing and target data estates and help you build a migration plan.