Cloud migration is, more often than not, treated as a one-way street where organizations migrate applications and workloads from on-premises to a public cloud, or less often, from one public cloud to another. But a key finding in our recent State of Hybrid Cloud survey of 350 IT professionals with cloud decision influence/authority is that a whopping 72% of participating organizations stated that they’ve had to move applications back on-premises after migrating them to the public cloud.

When you migrate workloads to the hybrid cloud, you need to keep an eye on those deployments to make sure you’re getting the performance and benefits you expect. And you need to watch it over time as things evolve. This includes both changes on your side—new or updated applications, increased demand, etc.—as well as new features from your cloud provider(s).

A harsh reality is that most businesses have failed to realize notable benefits from their cloud solutions. The fact is that it takes more than just a lift-and-shift-and-done approach. If you don’t plan your migration correctly, you could create problems down the line.

Did you know that Virtana Optimize’s Bill Analysis tool shows you not just the services currently monitored by Virtana but all services to deliver an overall view of your AWS cost? And if you’ve set up and configured consolidated billing to link multiple AWS accounts, you can include data from all those accounts in that view. You can even add multiple billing orgs to the same Virtana Optimize account.

For a successful cloud migration, creating (and later refining), a cloud migration strategy tailored to your organization’s goals, available resources, workloads, and priorities is an absolute necessity.