How much does it cost to migrate to the cloud in the UK?

The cost to migrate to the cloud in the UK typically ranges from £5,000 for a small business lift-and-shift, up to £50,000+ for enterprise refactoring projects. This initial cost includes infrastructure auditing, cloud architecture design, data transfer fees, and the engineering labor required to safely move workloads with zero downtime.

What are the hidden costs of cloud migration?

The most common hidden costs in cloud migration are data egress fees (charging you to move data out of the cloud), unoptimized idle resources, over-provisioned VMs, and a lack of automated auto-scaling. Additionally, 'lift-and-shift' migrations often cost more long-term than refactoring applications to be cloud-native.

Cloud Migration Cost Guide UK | AWS vs Azure Pricing

Q: Is AWS cheaper than Azure?

Neither AWS nor Azure is definitively cheaper; pricing depends entirely on your specific workload. AWS is often more cost-effective for pure open-source Linux and containerized workloads, whereas Azure provides massive licensing discounts (Azure Hybrid Benefit) if you already run Windows Server and SQL Server environments.

Moving your on-premise servers to the cloud promises infinite scalability and enhanced security. But without proper planning, it also promises massive, unpredictable monthly invoices. This guide explains exactly how cloud migration is priced in the UK market.

1. Initial Migration Costs (The Project Fee)

The first cost you encounter is the professional services fee paid to a Cloud Engineering firm (like Dastute) to physically execute the migration. The cost depends entirely on the migration strategy you choose.

Lift and Shift (Rehosting)

Moving your existing virtual machines to the cloud exactly as they are, without modifying the underlying application architecture.

Initial Cost: Low (£5,000 - £15,000)
Timeframe: Fast (Weeks)
Monthly Cloud Cost: Higher (Unoptimized)

Refactoring (Cloud-Native)

Rewriting or re-architecting your applications to use native cloud services like AWS Lambda, Serverless databases, and Docker containers.

Initial Cost: High (£20,000 - £100k+)
Timeframe: Slow (Months)
Monthly Cloud Cost: Lowest (Highly optimized)

2. Ongoing Cloud Costs: AWS vs Azure

Once you are in the cloud, you transition from CapEx (buying expensive servers every 5 years) to OpEx (paying for compute power by the second). The two undisputed market leaders in the UK are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Is AWS cheaper than Azure?

No cloud provider is objectively cheaper across the board. Pricing is completely dependent on your specific technology stack:

Choose Azure if: Your business relies heavily on Microsoft technologies (Windows Server, SQL Server, Active Directory). The Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to bring your existing on-premise Windows licenses to the cloud, frequently resulting in savings of up to 40% compared to AWS.
Choose AWS if: You are building modern, open-source applications using Linux, Postgres, and container orchestration (Kubernetes). AWS generally offers a broader ecosystem of developer tools and slightly better pricing for pure open-source workloads.

3. The 3 Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing

"Cloud Bill Shock" happens when businesses treat cloud servers like on-premise servers. If you aren't optimizing your environment, you will hemorrhage money through these three hidden costs:

Hidden Cost #1: Over-Provisioning (Idle Resources)

On-premise, you buy a massive server so it can handle your busiest day of the year (e.g., Black Friday). If you take that exact same massive server size and spin it up in AWS 24/7, you will pay a fortune. The cloud is designed to auto-scale. You should run small servers most of the time, and automatically spin up more power only when traffic spikes.

Hidden Cost #2: Data Egress Fees

Cloud providers let you put data into their cloud for free (Ingress). However, they charge you every time data leaves their network and travels over the public internet (Egress). If you design an architecture where an on-premise office constantly downloads massive terabytes of data from an AWS S3 bucket, your egress fees will be astronomical.

Hidden Cost #3: Forgotten Resources (Orphaned Disks)

When a developer deletes a virtual machine in the cloud, the attached storage drive (EBS volume) is not always deleted automatically. Over months, companies accumulate hundreds of "orphaned" storage drives that they are paying for hourly, despite them not being attached to any running application.

How to Control Cloud Costs (FinOps)

If you want to keep your cloud invoice low, you must implement FinOps (Financial Operations) strategies:

Reserved Instances (RIs): If you know you will need a server running 24/7 for the next 3 years, commit to a 3-Year Reserved Instance. Both AWS and Azure will discount the hourly rate by up to 72% in exchange for your commitment.
Turn off Dev environments: Use automation scripts to shut down development and testing servers at 6:00 PM on Friday and turn them back on at 8:00 AM on Monday. Why pay for 48 hours of compute power over the weekend when no developers are working?
Use Serverless: Services like AWS Lambda charge you by the millisecond of execution time. If your code isn't running, you pay exactly £0.00.

UK Cloud Migration Cost Guide (2026)