In the early days of cloud migration, “lift-and-shift” moves got enterprises into the cloud, but they weren’t pretty.
There may still be a time and place for lift-and-shift, however. Organizations might face what Stratascale Azure Practice Manager Carlos Borges calls “impending events” that trigger an urgent need to move to the cloud. Such events could involve short-term deadlines tied to an upcoming data center closure, hardware/support contract renewals, or even a sudden decision by the board to move everything to the cloud by a certain deadline.
The lift-and-shift method goes by another name: “rehost.” Rehosting is one of the six common ways application workloads move from legacy environments to the cloud. Deciding how best to migrate each workload requires a careful assessment by project teams. We’ll get more into that later in this report. For now, the following image briefly describes each of the common “Six Rs” of cloud migration.