Digital transformation and IT modernisation initiatives provide innovations to create a competitive edge and drive business growth. But they’ve also created increasingly complex environments that need to be managed by teams that are strapped for time and resources.

If you’ve been operating in the cloud for some time now, chances are your business has changed since you first made that move. Has your cloud usage grown considerably—and your OpEx costs? Is that just the cost of doing business in the cloud? It doesn’t have to be. Here’s how you can rationalize your infrastructure and determine if there are cloud expenses you can reclaim and even if it makes sense to move some of your cloud deployments into co-location.

No matter what’s driving your move to an AWS or Azure cloud, two things are true. One, you don’t want to under-provision, which could create performance and availability issues. And two, you don’t want to overpay, because no one ever wants to do that. One of the key decisions you must make is which Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure virtual machine instance configuration you need. It’s a scoping exercise, but several factors make this easier said than done.

Moving applications to a public cloud, no matter why you’re making that journey, is a high-stakes proposition. As an industry, we’re focused on rapidly moving forward to give our businesses the competitive edge they need. However, when it comes to cloud migration, we often fail to stop and ask some critical questions, and as a result we end up overspending and underperforming.