What is a Lift and Shift Migration Strategy?
Cloud migration vs Cloud application modernization
The lift and shift migration strategy, also known as rehosting, refers to the relocation of on-premises applications and work to the cloud with minimal modification. It is the most common approach and is primarily suitable for organizations looking to move quickly to the cloud without designing the whole IT infrastructure from scratch. The strategy has several benefits and also some challenges.
Benefits of Lift and Shift
- Speed: The greatest benefit reaped from a lift-and-shift migration is the speed of performance. Since the process involves minimal changes in the existing applications, it allows an organization to migrate its workload to the cloud at a much faster rate of execution and reduces the time taken to realize the benefits of cloud computing.
- Cost Saving: Organizations can save huge costs in developing and implementing new cloud-native applications by only shifting applications to the cloud without reconfiguring them. The ‘Lift and Shift’ strategy enables organizations to take full advantage of the cloud pricing model, such as pay-as-you-go, without incurring large capital costs.
- Reduced risk: Since lift and shift require minimal modification of existing applications, the risks associated with the introduction of new bugs or problems with application performance are very much at a minimum. This approach allows organizations to leverage the stability of existing applications during the migration process to the cloud.
Lift and Shift Challenges
- Not optimized: Although lift-and-move is a beeline approach toward migration to the cloud, it does not utilize many features of the cloud-native architecture. In optimized applications, once in the cloud, features like auto-scaling, high availability, or serverless computing are truly brought to life. This could cause organizations to lose out on some of the cost and performance benefits available from the cloud.
- Potential Performance Issues: Applications designed for on-premises may not perform to the maximum in a cloud environment without modifications. Hence, organizations may have to monitor and fine-tune such applications post-migration to meet performance expectations within the cloud.
- Post-Implementation: Even after a lift-and-shift migration, organizations must manage and maintain their cloud environment. This involves performance monitoring, resource optimization, and attention to security and compliance.
Despite its challenges, the lift and shift approach is an effective strategy for organizations looking to migrate to the cloud quickly. For more complex migration needs, organizations may consider a Replatforming Migration Strategy, which involves more significant modifications to applications to optimize them for the cloud.
