Cloud migration services in 2026: what a move off on-prem actually costs

Summary. As of 17 August 2026, AWS and Microsoft Azure price a 4 vCPU / 16 GiB general-purpose virtual machine in India at exactly the same rate: $0.2020 per hour for an m6i.xlarge in ap-south-1 and for a Standard_D4s_v5 in centralindia. Google Cloud's n2-standard-4 in asia-south1 runs $0.233288, about 15.5% higher. Three-year commitment discounts land within 0.1 percentage points of each other on AWS and Azure, at 60.4% and 60.5%. Compute price is not the variable that decides a migration budget. Four other things are: replication meters that bill while you are still testing, egress tiers between $0.1093 and $0.12 per GB, a licence cliff arriving on 13 October 2026, and India's data-residency rules, which most vendors describe incorrectly.

This page explains how we scope, sequence and cost a migration, and what we charge for.

The four costs that actually move the number

Most migration estimates model the destination and ignore the transition. The transition is where the overrun lives.

Replication runs on a clock, and each cloud sets a different one. AWS Transform MGN gives 2,160 replication-hours per source server, which is 90 days of continuous replication, then bills $0.042 per replication-hour per server, roughly $30.66 per server per month at 730 hours. Azure Migrate is free as a tool, but its server-migration component is free for 180 days per machine and then costs $25 per month per replicated instance. Azure Site Recovery, which teams often use alongside it, runs a completely different 31-day clock before the same $25 charge starts. Google's Migrate to Virtual Machines carries no time limit and no per-VM fee at all.

The trap on AWS is stated in its own FAQ: "While your source servers are actively replicating, including during the free period, you will incur charges for any AWS infrastructure that is provisioned by AWS Transform MGN to facilitate data replication." The tool is free for 90 days. The EC2 and EBS capacity it provisions underneath is not, and AWS publishes no sizing guidance for it.

Egress is priced in tiers, and the free-exit programmes have conditions. All three hyperscalers now waive data-transfer-out charges when a customer leaves, worldwide, not only in the EU. The conditions differ enough to matter. AWS allows 90 days and states plainly, "We don't require you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way." Azure allows 60 days and does require every subscription on the account to be cancelled first, with a 180-day carve-out only for UK-billed customers using UK datacentres. Google runs a 30-day initiation window followed by at least 30 days of migration.

Licence expiry is the forcing function. Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 reach the end of their third and final Extended Security Update year on 13 October 2026. There is no Year 4, inside Azure or outside it. Windows Server 2022 leaves mainstream support the following day, 14 October 2026. SQL Server 2016 left extended support on 15 July 2026 and is in ESU Year 1 now. Windows Server 2016 follows on 12 January 2027.

Commitment discounts are nearly identical across AWS and Azure, so they are not a selection criterion. They are a sequencing criterion, because signing one before the workload is right-sized locks in the wrong size for three years.

Compute pricing, like for like, India regions

All rates below are on-demand Linux, 4 vCPU / 16 GiB, pulled from first-party pricing APIs on 17 August 2026.

The AMD line is the sharpest available lever. An m6a.xlarge at $0.1111 and an n2d-standard-4 at $0.111532 deliver the same 4 vCPU and 16 GiB as their Intel counterparts for about 45% less, and the two are within 0.4% of each other. For workloads without an architecture-specific dependency, choosing the AMD variant saves more than most negotiated discounts do.

Commitment discounts: the same machine, three clouds

Effective hourly rates, same instances, same regions, computed as upfront divided by term hours plus any hourly component.

Azure's one-year reservation for a D4s_v5 costs $1,092. AWS's one-year Standard RI for the equivalent m6i.xlarge costs $1,091. Over three years the figures are $2,097 and $2,101. The two clouds price the same machine within $4 across a three-year commitment, which retires the "cloud X is cheaper on reservations" argument for general-purpose compute in India.

One structural finding worth acting on: AWS Compute Savings Plan rates are numerically identical to Convertible RI rates, and EC2 Instance Savings Plan rates match Standard RI rates. The choice between Savings Plans and Reserved Instances is about flexibility and administrative overhead, not price. Google's best three-year commitment, at 55%, is materially weaker than either.

Egress, and the EU Data Act deadline people are misreading

Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, the Data Act, entered into force on 11 January 2024 and applied from 12 September 2025. Article 29 states: "From 12 January 2027, providers of data processing services shall not impose any switching charges on the customer for the switching process." Article 2(36) defines switching charges to include "data egress charges".

The misreading is widespread and expensive. Article 29 zeroes charges for switching. Article 34(2) covers the separate case of running two clouds side by side, and it says providers "may impose data egress charges, but only for the purpose of passing on egress costs incurred, without exceeding such costs." That provision has no sunset. Multicloud and hybrid egress stays chargeable at cost after January 2027. If a design assumes free cross-cloud traffic from 2027, it is wrong, and the error compounds monthly.

Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the Competition and Markets Authority, said on 31 March 2026: "Cloud remains central to our approach - we've seen real progress through our engagement with Microsoft and Amazon to drive meaningful improvements on egress fees and interoperability and we expect more action from them over the coming months."

The licence cliff, and what changed on 1 April 2026

Microsoft changed the economics on 27 March 2026, effective 1 April 2026: "Microsoft is introducing a consistent Extended Security Update pricing model so that customers pay the same list price regardless of: Deployment location: Azure, on-premises, or other public clouds."

The consequence is direct. "Move to Azure and the Extended Security Updates are free" is now a legacy-only benefit. It still holds for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 and for SQL Server 2014. It does not hold for the 2016 generation, and Microsoft says so: "Starting with SQL Server 2016 (13.x), migrating your workload to SQL Server on Azure VMs no longer provides free access to ESUs for SQL Server 2016 (13.x) instances."

Published ESU rates through Azure Arc, as of 17 August 2026: Windows Server 2012 Standard at $0.00648 per core per hour and Datacenter at $0.03733, both exactly linear per core. SQL Server 2016 ESU runs $0.19 per hour for Standard edition and $0.74 for Enterprise. Licensing minimums bite on small estates: 8 cores per virtual machine and 16 cores per physical server for Windows, 4 cores per VM for SQL. No list price for Windows Server 2016 ESU has been published yet, which is consistent with billing beginning on 13 January 2027.

For teams still on VMware, the position is that perpetual licensing is gone across every edition and metric, the minimum is 16 cores per processor including cores deactivated in the BIOS, and Broadcom publishes no public list price per core for VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation, vSphere Standard or vSphere Essentials Plus. The absence of a public rate card is the planning problem, because it makes renewal exposure unmodellable until a quote arrives. We cover the exit path in more detail in our VMware and Broadcom exit migration service.

What we build, and how the engagement runs

We take on lift-and-shift migrations, re-platforming, and application modernisation where the target is a managed service rather than a virtual machine. Typical work: moving Windows and Linux estates off ageing hypervisors, migrating SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases to managed instances, rebuilding networking and identity in the destination, and putting cost controls in before the bill arrives rather than after.

Our five-step process:

1. Application portfolio analysis. Dependency mapping, a per-application disposition (retire, retain, rehost, re-platform, refactor), and a technical-debt quantification pass. This is where we find the servers nobody owns.
2. Landing zone build. Accounts or subscriptions, network topology, identity, logging, guardrails and tagging, built as infrastructure-as-code so it is reproducible.
3. Pilot wave. Two to five low-risk applications, migrated end to end, to calibrate the estimates. Every later wave is priced off measured throughput from this one, not from a spreadsheet.
4. Production waves. Scheduled cutovers with tested rollback, run against the replication clocks above so that meters do not run while a wave waits.
5. Right-size, then commit. Thirty days of production telemetry, resizing, and only then a commitment purchase. Buying reservations before this step is the most common way to lock in waste for three years.

Engagement model: a fixed-price discovery and landing-zone phase, then migration waves priced per wave against the disposition from step one, then an optional managed run. We publish no per-server rate card, because a rate card prices the wrong thing. A 4-core application server with no dependencies and a 40-core database cluster with a licence entanglement are not the same unit of work. Discovery produces the number, and discovery is quoted before it starts.

India-specific considerations

The residency picture is widely misdescribed, so it is worth stating precisely.

Section 16 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 is a blacklist, not a whitelist: "The Central Government may, by notification, restrict the transfer of personal data by a Data Fiduciary for processing to such country or territory outside India as may be so notified." Transfers are permitted by default and no country has been notified.

The DPDP Rules 2025 were notified on 13 November 2025 as G.S.R. 846(E). Rule 13(4) obliges a Significant Data Fiduciary to keep specified personal data and its traffic data inside India, and Rule 15 conditions transfers on meeting requirements about making data available to a foreign State. Both sit in the eighteen-month tranche, so they commence on 13 May 2027. Neither localises anything today: Rule 13(4) bites only on data the Central Government later specifies on a committee's recommendation, and no committee has been constituted and no list published.

Payments are the genuine exception, and they are older. The Reserve Bank of India's directive of 6 April 2018 requires that "the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India." The RBI's own FAQ allows processing abroad but requires that the data "should be deleted from the systems abroad and brought back to India not later than the one business day or 24 hours from payment processing, whichever is earlier." That 24-hour repatriation rule, not the DPDP Act, is what constrains a payments architecture.

For public-sector buyers the rule is absolute. The MeitY Master Service Agreement guidelines require services from a MeitY-empanelled datacentre located in India and prohibit taking any data outside India without the purchaser's explicit approval.

We design cloud architectures aligned with DPDP Act 2023 requirements and with the RBI storage directive where payment data is in scope. eCorpIT is certified for CMMI Level 5, ISO 27001:2022, and is MSME registered. Our data residency and DPDP cloud architecture service covers the design patterns in depth, and teams already in the cloud should read our guidance on cloud FinOps for Indian teams and on sizing Savings Plans coverage.

Why eCorpIT

We are a Gurugram-based technology consulting organisation founded in 2021, with senior-led, multi-disciplinary engineering teams. We hold CMMI Level 5, ISO 27001:2022 and MSME certification, and we work as partners of AWS, Microsoft and Google. Migration work runs alongside our cloud application development and DevOps services practices, which matters because a migration that lands without a deployment pipeline and cost controls has moved the problem rather than solved it.

The honest position on sequencing: the migration is rarely the expensive part. The licence renewal you were trying to avoid, the reservation you bought too early, and the egress you did not model are the expensive parts.

FAQ

How much does a cloud migration cost?

Discovery output determines it, because dispositions differ per application. The predictable components are priced: AWS charges $0.042 per replication-hour per server after 2,160 free hours, Azure charges $25 per replicated instance per month after 180 days, and Google's Migrate to Virtual Machines is free with no time limit.

Is AWS or Azure cheaper for Indian workloads?

Neither, for general-purpose compute. As of 17 August 2026 an m6i.xlarge in ap-south-1 and a Standard_D4s_v5 in centralindia both cost $0.2020 per hour. One-year reservations are $1,091 and $1,092 respectively. Choose on managed services, licensing position and team skills instead.

Will egress charges disappear in January 2027?

Only for switching. Article 29 of the EU Data Act removes switching charges from 12 January 2027, but Article 34(2) permits at-cost egress charges indefinitely where two cloud services run in parallel. Multicloud and hybrid traffic stays chargeable. Designs assuming free cross-cloud transfer after 2027 will overrun.

When does Windows Server 2012 support truly end?

The third and final Extended Security Update year ends on 13 October 2026, and no fourth year exists in Azure or outside it. Windows Server 2016 reaches end of support on 12 January 2027, with Extended Security Updates configurable from 3 August 2026 and billing beginning 13 January 2027.

Do the DPDP Rules force us to keep data in India?

Not yet, and not generally. Rules 13(4) and 15 commence on 13 May 2027 and apply to Significant Data Fiduciaries. Rule 13(4) covers only data the Central Government later specifies on a committee's recommendation, and no committee has been constituted. Section 16 remains an empty blacklist.

Can we process payment data outside India?

Processing abroad is allowed; storage is not. The Reserve Bank of India requires payment system data to be stored only in India, and its FAQ requires data processed abroad to be deleted there and returned within one business day or 24 hours, whichever is earlier. That repatriation window shapes the architecture.

When should we buy reserved instances?

After thirty days of production telemetry in the destination, never before. Three-year all-upfront commitments cut roughly 60.4% on AWS and 60.5% on Azure, but they lock the instance size for the full term. Buying before right-sizing converts a sizing mistake into a three-year contractual one.

What does Broadcom charge per core for VMware?

Nothing is published. Broadcom lists no public per-core price for VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation, vSphere Standard or vSphere Essentials Plus, and its former pricing page redirects to the homepage. The binding minimum is 16 cores per processor, counting cores deactivated in the BIOS.

How eCorpIT can help

We scope migrations by measuring rather than estimating: a fixed-price discovery and landing-zone phase produces an application-by-application disposition, and every later wave is priced off measured pilot throughput. We build the destination as infrastructure-as-code, sequence cutovers so replication meters do not run against idle waves, and hold commitment purchases until thirty days of production telemetry exist. If you are facing the 13 October 2026 Extended Security Update deadline or a VMware renewal without a published rate card, contact us and we will start with the discovery phase.

References

1. AWS Application Migration Service FAQs - free replication hours and the infrastructure-charges caveat.
2. AWS Application Migration Service pricing offer file - $0.042 per replication-hour.
3. Azure Migrate pricing - free tool, 180-day server migration allowance, $25 per instance per month.
4. Azure Site Recovery FAQ - the separate 31-day free period.
5. Google Migrate to Virtual Machines pricing - no charge for migrations into Google Cloud.
6. Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, the Data Act - Articles 2(36), 25, 29 and 34(2).
7. AWS free data transfer out when moving off AWS - 90-day window, no account closure required.
8. Cancel your Azure subscription - 60-day window and the UK carve-out.
9. Google Cloud exit terms - initiation and migration windows.
10. Microsoft services pricing consistency update - Extended Security Update pricing change effective 1 April 2026.
11. SQL Server Extended Security Updates - no free ESU in Azure from SQL Server 2016.
12. Google Cloud general-purpose machine pricing - n2 and n2d rates for asia-south1.
13. AWS EC2 on-demand price list, Asia Pacific (Mumbai) - m6i, m6a and t3 hourly rates.
14. AWS EC2 price list, ap-south-1 - Reserved Instance upfront and hourly terms.
15. Azure Retail Prices API - D4s v5 on-demand, spot and reservation pricing for centralindia, Bandwidth meters, and Azure Arc extended security update rates.
16. AWS EC2 data transfer price list, Asia Pacific (Mumbai) - outbound egress tiers.
17. Google Cloud VPC network pricing - premium tier egress rates for asia-south1.
18. Google Cloud committed use discounts overview - 28%, 46% and 55% discount bands.
19. CMA announces package of actions on business software and cloud services - Sarah Cardell, 31 March 2026.
20. VMware end of availability of perpetual licensing - all editions and metrics.
21. Counting cores for VMware Cloud Foundation - 16-core per processor minimum.
22. Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 - Section 16.
23. RBI, Storage of Payment System Data - directive of 6 April 2018.
24. RBI FAQ on storage of payment system data - 24-hour repatriation requirement.
25. MeitY guidelines for Master Service Agreement - clause 1.17.4 on India-located empanelled datacentres.

Last updated: 17 August 2026.