Cloud Migration & Cost Optimization
Slash infrastructure spend by 40-60% while modernizing legacy systems for the cloud era.
The Challenge
Financial services firms operating on legacy on-premises infrastructure face escalating hardware refresh cycles, capacity planning bottlenecks, and mounting operational costs. Aging data center contracts lock organizations into rigid spending with little visibility into actual resource utilization, which typically hovers at just 15-25% of provisioned capacity. Compliance requirements unique to finance add friction to any migration effort, while the lack of cloud-native skills internally stalls transformation initiatives. Without a structured migration and FinOps strategy, organizations risk ballooning cloud bills that exceed their on-premises costs within the first year.
Our Solution
MicrocosmWorks can deliver a phased cloud migration program that pairs a thorough discovery and assessment phase with a hybrid lift-and-shift and refactor execution strategy. We begin with automated infrastructure scanning and dependency mapping to classify every workload by migration disposition—rehost, replatform, refactor, or retire. A dedicated FinOps practice is embedded from day one, establishing cost allocation tags, budgets, alerts, and reserved instance purchasing strategies before a single workload moves. Post-migration, we implement continuous cost governance dashboards and anomaly detection to ensure savings persist over time.
System Architecture
The architecture follows a landing zone model with a multi-account structure that enforces security boundaries, network segmentation, and cost isolation by business unit. A centralized governance account aggregates billing, compliance checks, and audit logs, while workload accounts host migrated applications behind private subnets with controlled egress.
- Discovery & Assessment Engine: Automated scanning of on-premises servers, databases, and dependencies using agentless collectors to build a complete migration inventory
- Landing Zone Scaffold: Pre-configured multi-account structure with guardrails for IAM, networking, encryption, and logging that meets financial regulatory standards
- Migration Factory: Automated rehost pipelines using AWS MGN or Azure Migrate, combined with refactoring sprints for high-value workloads targeting containers or serverless
- FinOps Control Tower: Real-time cost dashboards, reserved instance and savings plan optimization, rightsizing recommendations, and automated budget enforcement with Slack/Teams alerts
Technology Stack
| Layer | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Backend | Python, Go, AWS Lambda, Step Functions |
| AI / ML | Anomaly detection for cost spikes, ML-based rightsizing recommendations |
| Frontend | React, Grafana dashboards, AWS QuickSight |
| Database | Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL), DynamoDB, Redis |
| Infrastructure | Terraform, AWS Control Tower, AWS Organizations, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions |
Implementation Approach
The engagement follows a four-phase delivery over 12-16 weeks. Weeks 1-3 focus on discovery and assessment, running automated infrastructure scans, dependency mapping, and workload classification across the on-premises estate. Weeks 4-9 execute the core migration factory, moving rehost workloads via AWS MGN while parallel refactoring sprints modernize high-value applications for containers or serverless. Weeks 10-13 establish the FinOps control tower, configuring cost allocation tags, reserved instance strategies, anomaly alerts, and governance dashboards. Weeks 14-16 cover optimization tuning, knowledge transfer, and handoff of runbooks to the internal operations team.
Key Differentiators
- FinOps-First Migration: Unlike lift-and-shift-only providers, MW embeds a dedicated FinOps practice from day one, ensuring cost governance is architected into the landing zone before a single workload moves rather than bolted on after bills spike.
- Hybrid Migration Factory Model: MW can combine automated rehost pipelines for commodity workloads with targeted refactoring sprints for high-value applications, maximizing migration velocity without sacrificing modernization opportunities.
- Continuous Cost Governance: Post-migration, MW can deliver anomaly detection dashboards and automated budget enforcement that persist long after the engagement ends, preventing the cloud cost sprawl that plagues most migration projects within the first year.
Expected Impact
| Metric | Improvement | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure cost | 40-60% reduction | Right-sizing, reserved instances, and elimination of idle resources |
| Deployment velocity | 5x faster | Automated provisioning replaces multi-week hardware procurement cycles |
| Resource utilization | 65-80% average | Dynamic auto-scaling replaces static over-provisioning |
| Disaster recovery RTO | 90% reduction | Cloud-native backup and cross-region replication versus tape-based recovery |
| Compliance audit time | 70% reduction | Automated compliance checks and continuous evidence collection |
Related Services
- Cloud Solutions — Core migration execution, landing zone design, and ongoing cloud management
- Digital Consulting — Migration strategy, workload assessment, FinOps practice establishment, and organizational change management
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