Re-hosting (Lift and Shift)

This strategy offers faster ROI and cost savings with minimal risk. It involves moving your data and applications from on-premises architecture to a cloud environment without any significant modifications to the underlying code or system architecture.

Application scenarios:

• When you are looking at a legacy migration scenario for a large enterprise that involves scaling up quickly with minimal optimizations to meet a fixed deadline.

• When you are new to cloud and want to migrate an off-the-shelf application.

Re-platforming (Lift, Tinker and Shift)

In addition to the standard ‘Lift and Shift’, this approach also entails certain optimizations to the components of the application such as OS, API, and middleware to derive cloud benefits without refactoring the core application architecture. An example would be upgrading your application’s core database management system and moving it to the cloud to run as a fully managed service. This approach helps you add new components to the application to improve performance and security, while being cost-effective.

Application scenarios:

• When you are looking at a legacy migration scenario for a large enterprise that involves scaling up quickly with minimal optimizations to meet a fixed deadline.

Re-purchasing (Drop and Shop)

Moving with this strategy involves replacing your on-premises applications integrated with a cloud-native third-party SaaS platform that has similar capabilities. Replacing software for standard functions such as accounting, finance, HRM, CRM, CMS, and Email are some good examples of this. Essentially, this requires a licensing model where your solution gets integrated with other vendor solutions. This newly cloud-enhanced version of your application offers higher efficiency, storage, savings, and lower maintenance cost.

Application scenarios:

• If your current application is incompatible with cloud environments and is difficult to re-platform, re-host, or strictly adhere to SLAs.

Retaining (Hybrid Model)

This is a hybrid migration model that allows you to categorize your workloads based on specific requirements and specific components to the cloud while retaining the rest on-premises. The strategy offers you the benefits of the cloud as well as keeping critical workloads and confidential data on-premises. You may find some stand-alone workloads more suitable to keep on-premises considering factors such as security constraints, regulatory requirements, and cost-efficiency. You have the option to revisit the solution later and incrementally move more components to the cloud aligned with changing business needs.

Application scenarios:

• You are invested heavily in the on-premises application and are unable to make a full switch.

• Your organization is in the process of a large-scale migration that may take many years.

Retiring

The strategy allows you to create a leaner infrastructure by eliminating, downsizing, and archiving an application that you find not productive or not worth migrating to the cloud. This involves freeing up resources and use them for optimizing other business-critical applications. Retiring can be implemented through eliminating redundant elements in the cloud infrastructure by repurposing it as needed. This allows you to achieve significant cost savings in the long run while you focus on optimizing resources that are more widely used and lower the complexity of computing, architecture, storage, licensing, and backup. You will need to scrutinize your IT stack in terms of their dependencies, use, and cost to the company. Experts say that as much as 10% of an enterprise IT portfolio is no longer useful and can simply be turned off. However, discovering the components which are no longer required is a crucial task and must be given careful consideration in the Discovery and IT portfolio analysis phase.

Application scenarios:

• If your app is obsolete and redundant and has no productive value.

• If your app has not been accessed or is down for an extended period.