Original Post (ITDirector_Ahmed):
We're running about 300 bots on-premise right now with significant infrastructure investment. Management is pushing cloud migration because "everyone's doing it" but I'm not convinced the economics work for us. Cloud vendors promise lower TCO but when I model it out with API call volumes, data transfer costs, and licensing changes, we'd actually spend more over three years. On the flip side, our VM infrastructure is aging and we're looking at 200k hardware refresh soon. Anyone done the real math on this beyond vendor marketing? What's the actual break-even point where cloud makes sense? Our processes are high-volume transactional stuff, thousands of executions daily, and the per-transaction pricing in cloud models looks brutal. Also concerned about latency for real-time processes and data residency requirements for our GDPR compliance. What am I missing here?
(CloudArchitect_Priya):
You're asking the right questions and honestly many companies lose money on cloud migration because they don't account for their actual usage patterns. High-volume transactional automation on cloud can get expensive fast, especially if you're moving large amounts of data in and out. Where cloud makes sense is if you have highly variable workload - like month-end processing that spikes then drops off. Cloud elasticity helps there. For steady-state high-volume stuff, on-prem often wins financially. The break-even analysis needs to include not just licensing but also data egress fees, storage costs for logs and audit trails, and premium support tiers which you definitely need in production. One thing vendors don't highlight - if you're doing RPA with lots of API integrations to cloud services anyway, having your bots in cloud reduces data transfer costs between services. But if you're automating desktop applications and internal systems, keeping bots close to those systems performs better and costs less. Hybrid approach might be your answer.
(SecurityCompliance_Mark):
GDPR and data residency could actually force your hand regardless of cost. If you're processing EU citizen data with those bots, you need to guarantee where that data lives and moves. Cloud providers can meet compliance requirements but it requires specific configurations and usually costs more for the certifications and controls you need. On-prem gives you complete control over data location which simplifies compliance significantly. Also consider disaster recovery costs - cloud providers make it easy but those redundant regions and failover capabilities add up. With on-prem you're maintaining your own DR which has costs but you're already spending that. The hidden cloud cost that bites people is when applications your bots interact with aren't cloud-native. If you move bots to cloud but they're still accessing on-prem systems, the network latency can tank performance and you're paying for connectivity solutions like express route which negates the cloud savings. Don't migrate until your full ecosystem is ready or accept hybrid complexity and cost.
