Migrating to the cloud should ultimately reduce your total cost of IT assets and their management. Before you start a cloud-migration project, however, you should evaluate your underlying motivations and business drivers for the cloud migration. Such factors may include the following:
Reduction or elimination of an on-premise data center
Reduce administrative and operations data-center costs
Improved disaster recovery and business continuity
Improved application scalability and robustness
Cost savings through managed services (such as a database as a service, DBaaS)
Improved security
Depending on your application environment, your cloud migration may be complex and expensive. As such, you should perform a return-on-investment (ROI) analysis for your business drivers to fully justify your migration.