Costs
Initial costs for starting in or moving to cloud
If you’re starting out in cloud, or if you’re moving existing workloads, you’ll have some initial costs to cover. This includes paying for:
- dedicated time for staff to work on the cloud platform
- any staff you’ll need, which you do not currently have
- your own staff’s time so they can speak with technical teams and help them understand what you need
- a penetration test (pen test) and any further development work you need to fix security issues it finds
- licences for any software tools your team will need to build in cloud
- cloud infrastructure to support your development or move to cloud
- secure data transfer
- training your staff
- a period where you have to run your old service while you’re setting up your cloud
- shutting down your old service
Staff you'll need
If you have to hire staff, you might need to pay for the following roles:
- business analyst
- user researcher
- service designer
- technical architect
- security architect
- security manager
- project manager
- scrum master
- cloud engineer
You might not need to have all these roles. But you might need staff to cover all these responsibilities.
The cloud platform service will not be able to supply you with these staff members.
If you do not have staff to fill these roles, you might need to hire contractors. How long you hire these contract staff for, will depend on what you’re trying to do.
Pen testing costs
The cost of pen testing can vary depending on what’s tested. Pen tests can start from £6,000, but can also cost up to £20,000.
If you’re migrating many workloads, you might need to pay for multiple pen tests. You’ll need to pen test all workloads before you make services live to users.
You’ll need to do a pen test:
- on all workloads
- anytime you make significant changes or annually
Examples of significant changes include:
- adding a new tool or package
- changes to your authorisation or authentication model
- adding a new public access point
Estimating your workload costs
You’ll also need to estimate the cost of running your workloads in the cloud. You can do this using the Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure calculators.
You should confirm your technical architecture before completing the calculators. This will make your cost estimates more accurate.
Ongoing support costs
Once you’re in the cloud, you’ll also have ongoing costs to maintain what you’re doing there. You’ll need to pay:
- technical support fees
- for each Okta licence you need
- a cloud platform shared service cost (this will be 7% of your cloud usage)
If you want to use GitHub for source code management, you can also choose to pay for this.
It's also important to understand that:
- you might have further shared costs as the cloud platform changes in future
- cloud costs can go up and down as the value of the dollar or pound changes
- cloud costs can also go up and down depending on your use
But, you can also save money by reusing and sharing services with other organisations.
Saving money on the cloud platform
There are lots of costs for joining and using cloud but the platform can save you some of this.
For example, the cloud platform team can turn on some security features at a platform level. This means you'll share this cost with others, rather than paying the whole cost yourself.
You'll also get discounts on cloud usage rates. The cloud platform also gives 'economies of scale'. This means it becomes cheaper as more organisations join it.