A company recently migrated its on-premises servers to a public cloud using a "lift and shift" (rehost) strategy, provisioning virtual machines (VMs) with the same specifications as the physical hardware. A post-migration cost analysis shows that cloud spending is much higher than projected, although application performance is stable. Utilization reports indicate that the CPU and memory usage on most VMs averages below 30%.
Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the unexpected high costs?
The cloud provider is charging extra monthly fees for migrating from an on-premises environment.
Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing models only charge for consumed resources, not provisioned capacity.
Data egress charges from the initial "lift and shift" migration are causing the high recurring monthly bills.
The virtual machines are overprovisioned, leading to payments for underutilized resources.
The most likely cause of the high costs is that the virtual machines are overprovisioned. In a pay-as-you-go model, cloud providers typically bill for the resources that are provisioned (allocated), not just the resources that are actively consumed. Since the VMs were sized to match the on-premises hardware without considering their actual lower utilization in the cloud, the company is paying for significant unused capacity, which is a common issue in "lift and shift" migrations. The process of analyzing usage and adjusting provisioned resources to match the actual workload is known as right-sizing, a key practice for cloud cost optimization.
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