What is Lift and Shift Cloud Migration? Benefits, Challenges and Comparisons

You might think migrating to the cloud is a complex and time-consuming process. But what if we told you that with the right strategy in place, you can move to the cloud efficiently and securely? 

Dow Jones, a leading news organization, did the same. With a deadline of just two months, they successfully migrated 55% of their data and applications to the cloud using the lift and shift migration. Not only did they meet the deadline, but also reduced their IT costs by over 50% compared to maintaining physical data centers.

If Dow Jones can achieve such remarkable results in such a short time, think about what lift and shift cloud migration can do to your business. 

Want to know more about how this migration strategy can benefit your business? Keep reading! 

What Is Lift And Shift Migration?

It is a type of cloud migration where you simply lift your data and applications from your on-premise system and shift them to the cloud without any or minimal changes. 

Also referred to as rehosting, it allows you to host your data and application to a new platform, i.e., the cloud. 

There are no or minor changes made to the application’s architecture and code; it’s just that your infrastructure is changing. Therefore, it eliminates the complexity, making it a fast way to transit to the cloud. 

However, you must ensure that along with the data, application, and workloads, you are also shifting the objects, components, and relationships mapped with them. Otherwise, they will not function properly in your cloud environment, resulting in errors and slowing down operations. 

Benefits of List and Shift Cloud Migration

Find out how migrating to the cloud can be quick and hassle-free without the need for complex planning. Let’s discover the benefits rehosting offers:

1. Fast and Convenient Migration 

One of the key benefits that lift and shift migration offers is the speed and convenience of the cloud migration process. You do not have to indulge in extensive modifications or optimizations that require recoding or the setup of a complex infrastructure. You just pick and drop your data, apps, and workloads to the cloud as it is, allowing you to leverage the cloud immediately after a successful migration. At the same time, your business teams are already familiar with the workflows, minimizing the need for retraining staff and making it convenient for them to work.    

2. Updated Infrastructure With Low Cost   

When comparing the on-premise vs. cloud, updating the lift and shift strategy provides you with updated cloud infrastructure at a lower cost compared to an on-premise system. As, when you think of upgrading your on-premise system, you have to indulge in a lengthy process of backing up your data, purchasing supporting hardware, installing updates, testing, and then evaluating the outcomes. This process requires significant investment and time.  

However, when you migrate to the cloud, your cloud provider rolls out updates for new features and advancements in existing functionalities, allowing you to leverage them without incurring any additional investments. You can use cloud technologies such as computing power, storage solutions, and networking capabilities as per your requirements and install updates that are relevant to your business. Moreover, you only have to pay for those services that you are using and can scale them up or down as per your needs. This way, you save costs and leverage an environment that is powered with the latest features and functionalities. 

3. Scope of Future Modernization 

Once your data, apps, and workflows enter the cloud environment, the lift and shift strategy inherently does not modernize your processes. It lays a foundation for the same. 

After the initial migration to the cloud, you can assess improvement and optimization areas in your applications. See which areas can be enhanced by leveraging modern cloud-native features and architectures. Where can you utilize the latest technology, such as AI and ML, for automation and analytics to boost your productivity and insights? Or how can containerization, microservices, serverless architecture, and more help in improving your performance and efficiency? 

This is how lift and shift migration allows you to work on further enhancements and explore advanced options in the cloud.   

4. Minimal Planning and Resource Requirements 

In the on-premise vs. cloud debate, lift and shift cloud migration weighs at minimal planning and minimal resource requirements. 

Lift and shift migration requires the least effort in planning when compared to other migration strategies because of its simple transfer procedure. You only need to assess what apps, data, or workloads you want to migrate and to which cloud infrastructure or provider. Your teams do not have to indulge in an in-depth assessment of dependencies and performance tuning. As a result, you can leverage your existing applications as they are in the cloud environment. 

Additionally, there is no need to hire additional talent or leverage migration tools to perform this simple migration. However, your existing business team must know the basics of cloud computing to get started with it. 

5. Offers Business Continuity

With a lift and shift migration strategy, you do not have to worry about your business operations getting disrupted. 

By just picking up the code and transferring it to the cloud, your existing operations are not impacted, and your business teams can continue to work. This process does not hinder your existing processes. 

Additionally, your business teams are familiar with the workloads and applications on their on-premise system, which works the same over the cloud in this approach. Therefore, it does not require additional training to get hands-on with the resources. 

Drawbacks of Lift and Shift Migration 

While rehosting offers speed and simplicity, it also comes with security risks to your data and processes. Here we have presented some of the pitfalls of the lift and shift strategy that you must know before leveraging it in your business. 

1. Risk of Disruption and Downtime

Your existing workflows may not perform optimally if not thoroughly tested for the cloud environment. It is because these processes were designed initially to work best with your on-premise system. Therefore, when you shift them directly to the cloud, it hinders the ability of business processes to adapt to the cloud environment. This might result in disruptions and performance issues, causing slower response times.

2. Security Constraints 

This strategy poses a significant risk to your business data, apps, and workflows when directly transferred to the cloud without examining it. This way, you are allowing all the unaddressed and unknown vulnerabilities that already existed in your on-premise systems to migrate to the cloud along with your data, causing significant risk to your cloud environment. 

These threats will not only affect your processes but might spread across your environment, resulting in a data breach, allowing unauthorized parties to enter your system and hamper the operations. 

3. Data Corruption 

The lift and shift strategy is not suitable for bulky and complex migration and might pose significant data loss risk. 

Transferring the data in bulk requires optimal transfer protocols and data conversion to simplify the process. However, it can harm data’s originality and accuracy, leading to false meaning, data loss, operational issues, and false outcomes. 

The risk of errors increases with the size of the migration, which can result in altered or damaged data, and recovering from it may incur significant costs.  

4. Misconfiguration 

This can become a great issue in lift and shift migration. You might just rush into the migration process without drafting a well-planned strategy, which might cause configuration errors and applications might fail to work. 

The infrastructure differs for both on-premise systems and the cloud, and so will the difference between their configurations, access management, and permission sets. Therefore, the configurations you made for your on-premise system may not work for the cloud and require changes. If not customized, they may lead to vulnerabilities. 

Lift and Shift Vs. Other Migration Strategies

As we have learned everything about lift and shift cloud migration, let’s explore how it is different from other cloud migration strategies. In this particular section, we are going to explore the same. 

We have compared re-platforming, refactoring, and re-locating strategies as they share a similar base to rehosting.  

1. Lift and Shift vs. Re-Platforming

Replatforming is referred to as ‘lift, tinker, and shift’ where slight modifications are made to the code of the applications during the migration process, which makes it more complex than rehosting. Additionally, these modifications made to business data, applications, and workflows make the cloud transformation process slower and more time-consuming. However, re-platforming improves the utilization of cloud capabilities and the environment because the code is optimized for what the cloud environment requires and suits best.   

2. Lift and Shift vs. Refactoring

Refactoring, also known as re-architecture, involves a high level of change in the code as well as the architecture of the application, requiring extensive technical expertise. You completely rethink how the application is built initially and then modify it to best suit the cloud environment by placing new components or replacing old ones. However, this makes the process more complex and time-consuming and poses a high risk of errors. 

Conversely, refactoring is beneficial in the long-term cost savings and offers improved performance throughout, while lift and shift can be a technical debt. 

3. Lift and Shift vs. Relocating

Relocating or hypervisor lift and shift migration strategy is similar to rehosting; the only difference is the platform’s adaptability. 

Rehosting helps you move from an on-premise system to the cloud, while relocating is typically used for moving already virtualized workloads within the same cloud provider or across the targeted cloud. It involves moving from one cloud region to another without significant changes. 

When To Use The Lift And Shift Migration Strategy? 

Lift and shift migration can help you lay the base for your digital transformation journey. Without the need for extensive technical expertise, your business teams can migrate data, apps, and workflows to the cloud as it is. After a quick shift to the cloud, your team can plan for further improvements when they require and leverage the cloud environment at its best.   

This approach works best for you when your on-premise system is costing you wonders. If you are spending a lot on purchasing, maintaining, and replacing your on-premise system or data centers to meet the latest upgrades in the tech world and remain competitive, then it’s time for you to shift to the cloud. 

By utilizing this migration strategy, you can move your data centers as they are from your on-site system to the cloud at a lesser cost than you would have spent on maintaining physical data centers. Moreover, you can scale your storage requirements up or down as per your needs, allowing you to only pay for what you are using. 

Consider what happens when your physical data centers are damaged, making it difficult to recover data. Well, with this strategy, you can migrate your data as it is to the cloud, allowing easy retrieval when needed without any modifications and the risk of losing it. 

If you are incurring heavy costs on renewing licenses of your on-premise technology or hiring experts to check up on the maintenance of your system to keep it secure and stable. This approach helps alleviate this burden and saves a significant amount on your IT requirements. Once in the cloud, the responsibility for updates, license renewal, and system maintenance shifts to the cloud provider.

Final Take

While lift and shift cloud migration offers a faster path to the cloud by moving existing applications with minimal changes, it is also important to assess whether this approach aligns with your business goals or not. 

This strategy works best for those organizations that are looking for quick cloud scalability and cost efficiency. This method provides a strong starting point, laying the base for future improvements. 

By now, you must have understood lift and shift migration’s benefits and drawbacks, how it is different from other strategies, and in which business scenarios you must leverage it.  

However, to explore more of its potential and to incorporate it into your business, it is suggested to connect with an expert. 

How Cyntexa Can Help?  

We are a prominent cloud consulting company with a team of 400+ cloud experts, specializing in multiple areas of cloud computing. 

Our team of professionals offers streamlined cloud migration services and guides you through every step of the migration process. We start by assessing your migration goals and evaluating which cloud migration strategy—rehosting, refactoring, re-platforming, and more—will work the best for your business. Further, we move by creating a strategy and executing it. 

By leveraging our services, you can ensure a successful migration process without any disruptions and make the most of your cloud environment.