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.

What Business Problems Should Trigger a Migration?

These are the kinds of business drivers we see behind most successful migrations:

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.

Tailor the Justification to the Org

There’s no one-size-fits-all. The case has to reflect your:

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.

Addressing Common Objections

CFOs and execs aren’t wrong to be skeptical. Here’s what we hear most:

"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.

The answer isn’t promises — it’s clarity:

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?

The Risk Is in the Gap

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.

You must:

Plan for headcount shift or reallocation
Eliminate old infra in phases (with a real sunset plan)
De-risk teams by training, not parallel staffing

You must:

Without that, cloud spend becomes additive, not transformative.

The Structure of a Good Business Case

A strong case looks like this:

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.

Business Case Is Framing, Not Hype

This isn’t about buzzwords. Don’t say "Kubernetes." Say:

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.