With more infrastructure and applications moving to the cloud in support of digital transformation, one of the decisions enterprises must confront is the best approach to cloud migration for long-term success. While some favor a lift-and-shift model, others come down on the side of replatforming or even a refactoring approach. However, there is no single path to success. And, indeed, a hybrid approach is often the ideal answer.

What Are The Options?

For companies wanting to move their workloads to the cloud, there are multiple migration approaches; however, we will discuss the three most common here. Naturally, there are benefits and disadvantages to each:

• Rehost, (aka, lift and shift,) is essentially a forklift approach to migrating applications to the cloud, moving them without any code modification. In this case, a VM is treated like a black box and copied bit by bit. This approach offers a faster, less resource-intensive migration process. However, lift-and-shift migrations don’t generally benefit from cloud-native features like elasticity, and while more cost-effective than on-premesis, it can be more costly to run applications in the cloud this way than if you were to replatform or refactor.

• Replatform migrations move assets to the cloud with a small amount of up-versioning — perhaps using a managed DB offering or the addition of automation-enabled autoscaling — to benefit from cloud infrastructure. While a slower migration path than rehosting, this approach offers a solid middle ground between rehosting and refactoring, allowing workloads to take advantage of base cloud functionality and cost optimization, without the level of resource commitment required for refactoring.

• Refactor involves a more advanced process of rearchitecting and often recoding some portion of an existing application to take advantage of cloud-native frameworks and functionality. This approach is the most time-consuming and resource-intensive, yet it can offer the lowest monthly spend of the three approaches. Organizations that refactor are able to modify their applications and infrastructure to take full advantage of cloud-native features and to maximize operational cost efficiency in the cloud.

Migration Path Assessment

By looking at the totality of an IT system, it may be possible to identify which infrastructure and workloads are of low business value and should be retired and which are of high business value and should be relocated to the cloud.