Many companies are adopting cloud computing as a core component of their technology strategy, but they often underestimate the costs associated with cloud migration. To accurately estimate these costs, organizations need to consider three main categories: current application and infrastructure costs, qualitative financial estimates of cloud infrastructure costs, and cloud migration costs. The latter includes the cost of migrating systems and data to the cloud, as well as labor costs for porting apps and creating inventory. A financial plan for a cloud migration requires building a timeline, understanding labor resources, and tracking weekly operating costs for both environments. Additionally, organizations need to benchmark their target environment to ensure operational parity with benchmarks before retiring original systems.