“Cut IT costs by 30%.” How to read cloud migration news and what to count in your own company

In October the CNews feed ran a string of stories about Cloud.ru: an agricultural complex cut IT infrastructure costs by 30%, a real estate developer's IT subsidiary cut design costs fourfold, an integrator got access to AI tools. Next to them, a Postgres Professional study: 80% of companies keep using foreign products for analytics. The vendor and the integrator write stories like these, and they count the percentages by their own rules. For a business owner thinking about moving their own system, it is more useful to know which numbers to count in their own company than to argue with someone else's.

What's in the news

On October 26, CNews reported that the Ivanisovo agricultural complex cut IT infrastructure costs by 30% after migrating to Cloud.ru. According to the description, the IT company Ridzhitekh built a digital platform for managing the agricultural complex and moved it to Cloud.ru. What went into those 30%, I can't tell from the headline and the short description: hardware rent, licenses, admin salaries or all of it together. For an agribusiness with sites out in the field, the first thing I would ask is what happened to the network out to the sites, because that is usually where the real costs live.

On October 20, CNews wrote that the IT subsidiary of Samolet Group migrated to Cloud.ru and cut building design costs fourfold. The company, Digital Development, moved its virtual desktops, VDI, to the cloud: design engineers work with heavy software on remote machines. Fourfold is a strong result, and I would want to know what was compared with what: buying workstations against renting them, or the time to set up a workplace for a new employee. The description doesn't say.

The same day, CNews reported that Cloud.ru will provide Navicon with AI tools for corporate customers: the integrator and the cloud provider expanded their partnership. This is a partnership story with no numbers, and I include it for context: integrators now sell a migration together with AI tools, and in a single contract it is easy to miss what you are paying for.

On October 13, CNews published a Postgres Professional study: data analytics has become a priority for most Russian companies, but 80% keep using foreign IT products for analytics. In my experience that is how it is. Reports get replaced last, because they hold years of habits of the people who work with them, and moving the database doesn't move the reports.

Example: a farm and its 30%

Take a farm with two sites and controllers on each. Its “IT infrastructure costs” include a virtual machine, traffic, backups, the routers at the sites, the VPN between them, and the hours of the person who keeps it all updated. You can cut the virtual machine bill by 30% by moving to another provider and at the same time double the support hours, because the network out to the sites will have to be rebuilt. The press release will show minus 30%, and your bill for the year will show a plus.

That is why I count a migration under four headings: money per month with all the hidden lines, access and who owns the server, recovery time after a failure, and dependence on a single vendor. The savings percentage comes out after all four are written down.

What my migrations looked like

At the PDR company in the US, in 2022 I set up a new server on Debian in Google Cloud and started rebuilding the data processing from there. In 2023 I moved the company website from ordinary hosting to this server and connected its forms to the CRM and the application, and moved the data from Google Sheets to MariaDB for speed and a single format. I didn't count savings percentages on that migration. The gain was elsewhere: the website, the API, the database and the telephony ended up on one server under my control, and since 2022 there have been no serious failures that needed a recovery.

At a hydroponic farm in the US, since 2023 the server is also on Debian in Google Cloud, with the MariaDB database there too. I connected two sites on private IP addresses to the server through a VPN and reverse proxies, and there are now 25 controllers in that network. If the question of moving that server came up tomorrow, the price of the virtual machine itself would be the last line in the calculation, and the network would be the first.

The studio website and the “Coffee Together” service live on a shared server with 2 GB of memory in Docker behind Nginx, and the payment screenshots in “Coffee Together” are stored in a private Yandex Object Storage bucket. I haven't worked with Cloud.ru, so I can't say anything about their pricing or quality.

What I would count before moving

Take the bills for the last 12 months and break them down by line: hardware rent or depreciation, licenses, traffic, backups, people's hours. Without this breakdown, the line “IT infrastructure” means nothing.

Count the same for the target option and add the cost of the move itself: hours, downtime, reconfiguring the network and the access.

Check recovery: where the backups are, how long it takes to bring the system up from them, and who has the access. The code, the database and the server should belong to you, even if an integrator does the migration.

Separate the database from the reports. If analytics lives in a foreign BI tool, moving the database won't touch it, and that is a separate project with its own timeline.

Start with one part, say the website, live with it for a month and measure. That way you get a percentage of your own.

On how a migration often starts with spreadsheets, there is an article on when a business needs a system instead of spreadsheets. Projects from this review: technical partnership with a PDR company and a hydroponic farm with 25 controllers. On who owns the code and the server, there is a review on sovereignty, the simple version, on the price of depending on a single vendor a review of the Yandex outage, on platforms versus your own server a review of backends on Vercel, Fly and Supabase. I covered a move of a different kind, an email domain, earlier. Service areas: infrastructure and DevOps and internal systems. If you are costing a migration and want to check your numbers, tell me what it costs now and where you are planning to go. Discuss your task.