The Lift and Shift Migration Strategy

This is the first step an organization will take in their migration journey from their current infrastructure to the cloud. It is the process of migrating a copy of your organization’s application or workload from on-premise to the cloud. Lift and shift migration can be a short-term or long-term strategy and typically is the fastest and most cost-effective method of cloud migration. This shift will allow your organization to begin to leverage the economic and unlimited computing power, storage, and networking infrastructure of the cloud.

Early in cloud computing days, lift and shift migration was utilized to update the organization’s oldest and most complex on-premise applications. Since cloud architectures have evolved and pricing has become more attractive, the long-term value of migrating those types of applications’ as-is’ having diminished because they cannot leverage the benefits of the cloud. Today, this migration solution is utilized for migrating workloads that are somewhat cloud-ready or if an organization is looking to rearchitect a massive application for the cloud.

Compared to running all of your organizations on-premise, there are many benefits to the lift and shift migration solution.

FAST AND COST-EFFECTIVE

Lift and shift allow for a quick migration without dedicating a large team to the project. Your on-premise applications can remain in place during the migration to have little to no downtime.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

Lift and shift allows you to run applications on updated, better-performing hardware without purchasing the equipment yourself.

EXPANDED CAPACITY WHILE CONSOLIDATING ON-PREMISES

Compute capacity, storage, and additional network bandwidth from the cloud on a pay-by-use basis.

SCALE ON DEMAND

Lift and shift can enable your organization to scale an application without purchasing and physically installing new computing capacity.

COST-SAVING ELASTICITY

Applications can take advantage of cloud elasticity to automatically spin-up and spin-down resources to match demand precisely. The higher your cloud’s flexibility and the more your application can leverage it, the more you stand to save.

ENHANCED SECURITY

Cloud security, such as role-based access control, can be used once migrated to the cloud.

REDUCED COSTS WITHIN THE DATA CENTER

The more applications you can migrate to the cloud, the faster you can scale down your on-premises infrastructure and manage and maintain it.

Once the decision is made to move to the cloud, your organization will want to partner with migration experts. This will expedite the process of lifting and shifting your applications, resulting in limited or no downtime. Even if you do most of the work in house, having additional resources in the planning stages or on standby can be worthwhile having. Cloud Rush can help you decide which migration strategy will work best now, provide direction for future applications, and make sure it ties into your broader cloud strategy.

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