CLOUD MODERNISATION
Cloud migration ROI: costs, benefits and measurement
Key takeaways
- Nucleus Research's $3.86 per dollar figure is an estimate from its research model, not a universal cloud-migration return.
- The 318% Google Cloud IaaS result and 304% Azure Arc result come from sponsored or commissioned studies of specific platforms.
- Flexera's survey points to 27% estimated waste and 28% expected spend growth, making cost governance part of the migration case.
Cloud migration ROI studies use different providers, workload scopes, time horizons and financial models. The evidence below preserves those boundaries instead of combining the findings into one expected return.
Cloud migration ROI evidence by study
| Study | Reported finding | Method and scope |
| Nucleus Research, 2023 | An estimated $3.86 in benefit for every dollar spent, up from $3.43 in its 2021 model. | Nucleus revisited its cloud-migration research model and described the 12.5% increase as an estimate influenced by higher on-premises costs and discounted migration services. |
| IDC and Google Cloud, study released 2023 | 318% five-year ROI for Google Cloud IaaS. | Google-sponsored IDC research based on nine interviewed organisations in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany that used Google Cloud IaaS. |
| Forrester and Microsoft, 2025 | 304% three-year ROI and payback in less than six months. | Microsoft-commissioned Total Economic Impact study. Forrester consolidated interviewee experience into a model for Azure Arc with cloud-based management services. |
The figures describe three separate analyses. They cannot be averaged, ranked as provider performance or applied directly to another portfolio.
Where the cloud studies found value
| Study | Reported contribution | Evidence boundary |
| Nucleus Research, 2023 | 78% of the modelled return came from eliminating on-premises costs. | Contribution within the Nucleus model, not a target cost mix for every migration. |
| IDC and Google Cloud | 51% lower operations cost over five years, 57% more efficient infrastructure management and 75% faster feature deployment. | Findings from the same nine-organisation Google-sponsored study. |
| Forrester and Microsoft | 30% modelled gain in IT operations productivity. | Finding from the commissioned Azure Arc composite, not general public-cloud productivity. |
Cloud spend and value capture
| Evidence | Finding | Scope |
| Flexera State of the Cloud, 2025 | Respondents estimated that 27% of cloud spend was wasted and expected spend to grow 28% in the following year. | Vendor survey of more than 750 technical professionals and executives worldwide involved in cloud use. |
| McKinsey cloud-value analysis, 2023 | 10% of companies had fully captured cloud's potential value, 50% were starting to capture it and 40% had seen no material value. | The article draws on CloudSights profiles of more than 80 enterprises and separately reports input from nearly 80 CTOs and cloud programme leaders. It describes profiled organisations, not a market-wide migration-success rate. |
These findings point to the need for workload-level unit economics, FinOps ownership and benefit tracking after migration. They do not prove one cause for underperformance.
Cloud investment and data-readiness context
| Evidence | Finding | How to read it |
| Gartner forecast, November 2024 | Worldwide public-cloud end-user spending was forecast to reach $723.4 billion in 2025, 21.5% above 2024. | A spending forecast published before the forecast year. It is not an observed migration-return measure. |
| Cherry Bekaert CFO Survey, 2025 | 49% said poor data quality blocked critical financial decisions. Improving data quality and integration ranked as the leading finance-operations priority. | Survey of 200 CFOs and senior finance executives at US middle-market organisations with $5 million to $250 million in revenue. It is finance-modernisation evidence, not a cloud ROI statistic. |
A credible business case should connect migration waves to application baselines, service levels, operating costs and business outcomes. Market spending alone does not establish value.
Sources
- Nucleus Research (2023). Cloud Migration Returns $3.86 for Every Dollar Spent.
- Google Cloud and IDC (2024). IDC: Migrating to Google Cloud IaaS Has a 318 Percent ROI.
- Microsoft and Forrester (2025). The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Azure Arc.
- Flexera (2025). State of the Cloud Report 2025.
- McKinsey & Company (2023). In Search of Cloud Value.
- Gartner (2024). Worldwide public-cloud end-user spending forecast.
- Cherry Bekaert (2025). Middle Market CFO Survey 2025.
