9. Building the Business Case
2024-09-01
If your migration doesn’t start from a real business problem, it won’t get support. But if it does solve one — and you show that clearly — no amount of internal resistance will stop it.
This section isn’t about justifying cloud to your CFO. It’s about telling a story of why not migrating puts the business at risk, or limits its potential.
Stability issues are slowing down growth or customer adoption
Slow product cycles are blocking the roadmap
Scaling problems are hurting margins or uptime
On-call load is burning out engineers
Market expansion requires regional infrastructure
Compliance needs can’t be met with current tooling
Cost of manual ops or recruiting infra talent is too high
If any of these exist, your migration already has a business case. You just need to frame it properly.
Industry (regulated vs. startup)
Stage (Series A vs. mature)
Product architecture (monolith vs. distributed)
Hiring difficulty (how hard is infra talent to find?)
Speed expectations (weeks vs. months per feature)
You can’t reuse someone else’s migration pitch. You have to build your own, based on pain your execs already know.
"We already invested in hardware / licenses / another provider."
"Will this take forever and distract from delivery?"
"Do we really need this, or is it just tech hype?"
"Who’s going to run it? We don’t have capacity."
But those aren’t objections to cloud. They’re fears of duplicated cost, stretched teams, or unclear value.
What current cost will we eliminate or reduce?
What delivery pain will improve?
Who will own what, and how will roles change?
What can we stop doing once we migrate?
And most importantly: What happens if we don’t do it?
Many migrations fail financially not because cloud is too expensive — but because teams never shut down what they replaced. They kept the old infra and the old people and the old processes and added AWS bills on top.
Plan for headcount shift or reallocation
Eliminate old infra in phases (with a real sunset plan)
De-risk teams by training, not parallel staffing
Without that, cloud spend becomes additive, not transformative.
Business Problem “We’re losing customers due to downtime and missed SLA targets.”
Tech Limitation “Our infra is fragile and scaling manually. We’re ops-bound.”
Cloud Outcome “Autoscaling, managed services, better visibility and DR.”
Cost Shift “We’ll reduce ops hours and vendor lock-in; costs move from reactive human work to predictable service usage.”
Timeline & Scope “First system moved in 4 weeks, full rollout over 6 months.”
Commitment Required “Some team roles shift; we stop investing in legacy path.”
That’s the story your CFO needs. And your CEO. And your board. They’re not allergic to tech. They’re allergic to tech with no business case.
We’ll reduce time to market by 2 weeks per feature.
We’ll halve on-call incidents in Q4.
We’ll remove infra as a hiring blocker.
We’ll ship to two new regions without buying new hardware.
If the outcome is real, migration becomes inevitable. Not everyone has to agree on the tooling. But everyone must agree on the problem, and what solving it will unlock.