For many enterprises, the idea of migrating from Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) to a modern platform feels like a daunting challenge. The perceived risks—disruption, costs, and complexity—often outweigh the urgency to act, leading to the decision to delay migration indefinitely.

However, doing nothing costs more. Enterprises that postpone migration are exposing themselves to significant financial, operational, and strategic risks.

Here’s why delaying your PCF migration could be the most expensive choice of all.

The Hidden Costs of Staying Put

Rising Licensing and Operational Expenses

PCF environments are costly to maintain, especially as VMware and Broadcom introduce steep licensing renewals. For one major U.S. telecom company, an imminent PCF license renewal threatened to skyrocket operational costs, spurring the need for urgent action.

Remaining on virtual machines (VMs), which are resource-intensive and underutilize cloud-native features, only compounds costs:

• Higher infrastructure expenses.

• Increased overhead for management and maintenance.

• Missed opportunities to leverage cost-saving cloud-native tools like autoscaling and orchestration.

For enterprises that delay migration, these expenses quickly surpass the upfront cost of transitioning to modern platforms.

Missed Opportunities for Optimization

Staying on legacy PCF environments means underutilizing the benefits of cloud-native solutions. Containers, unlike VMs, enable:

• Dynamic scaling: Flex resources up or down to match demand, reducing waste.

• Portability: Consistent deployments across environments, avoiding vendor lock-in.

• Rapid deployments: Faster application delivery for improved business agility.

In contrast, legacy PCF workloads often remain tied to VMs, leaving businesses stuck with inefficiency, limited scalability, and slow response times to market changes.

Escalating Risk Factors

Delaying PCF migration isn’t just costly—it’s risky. As PCF approaches end-of-life, enterprises face:

• Security vulnerabilities due to lack of updates or patches.

• Compliance risks from unsupported software environments.

• Service disruptions caused by unplanned failures or delays.

Consider the U.S. telecom provider case study: An urgent six-month deadline to migrate from PCF forced the company to act quickly, avoiding costly licensing renewals and ensuring their mission-critical applications stayed online.

Waiting even a few months longer could have resulted in escalated risks of downtime and millions in unnecessary costs.

Technical Debt: The Price of Delay

Each month of delay adds to an enterprise’s technical debt, making future migrations even more challenging:

• Applications become more outdated, requiring greater effort to refactor or replatform.

• Internal expertise diminishes over time, as teams lose familiarity with legacy systems.

• Critical timelines become compressed, forcing rushed migrations under unfavorable conditions.

As seen in the telecom case, Matilda Cloud’s ability to deliver a 5x faster migration with 60% less cost was key to meeting tight deadlines. Acting early prevented the spiral of compounding technical debt.

A Case in Point: From PCF to AWS

Now, let’s look at one of our first-hand experiences with PCF migration.

One of our customers, the largest telecom company in the U.S., faced a daunting challenge: migrate 500+ servers and refactor five mission-critical applications from PCF to AWS EKS and within six months. With escalating PCF costs and a fast-approaching license renewal deadline, inaction wasn’t an option.

Matilda Cloud’s Solution

Using Matilda Cloud’s Discover, Orchestrate, and Migrate tools, the company:

• Mapped dependencies to plan the migration.

• Right-sized workloads for optimized performance and cost.

• Refactored legacy applications to Kubernetes-compatible environments.

• Automated migration processes to minimize downtime and ensure accuracy.

The Results

• 5x Faster Migration: Accelerated the transition, meeting critical deadlines.

• 60% Less Migration Costs: Reduced both migration and operational expenses.

• 30% Annual Savings: Achieved long-term cost efficiencies.

• Mission-Critical Applications Modernized: Ensured scalability and performance for the future.

The True Cost of Doing Nothing

Deferring PCF migration may feel like a safe choice, but it’s one that comes with hidden costs:

1. Financial Strain: Rising licensing fees, inefficient VMs, and operational overhead add up fast.

2. Missed Opportunities: Cloud-native platforms deliver agility, scalability, and innovation—benefits you can’t unlock by staying on VMs.

3. Increased Risks: Security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and unplanned downtime grow as you delay.

The U.S. telecom provider’s case shows that taking action now is not only feasible but necessary. By leveraging Matilda Cloud’s end-to-end migration tools, enterprises can break free from the cycle of escalating costs and risks while achieving long-term operational excellence.

Don’t Let Delay Cost You More

The decision to migrate from PCF isn’t just about modernizing IT infrastructure—it’s about protecting your business from avoidable risks and unlocking future opportunities. With the right tools and expertise, enterprises can overcome the complexities of PCF migration and reap the benefits of containerized environments.

At Matilda Cloud, we specialize in helping businesses transition seamlessly from legacy platforms to cloud-native solutions.

Don’t wait until the costs of doing nothing are too high. Let’s start your migration journey today.