Lift and Shift Benefits and Drawbacks

Businesses are starting to look towards moving their on-premises applications and programs to cloud platforms for various reasons, including security and affordability. If you need to move your company’s physical and online data to the cloud, the best solution would be to use the lift and shift data migration technique. The concept of lift and shift migration, also known as rehosting, is the process of moving applications and operations to the cloud. Lift and shift migration allows companies to migrate applications from a physical on-premises presence to a cloud system. This is done without redesigning or changing the workload. Cloud systems are not just the new norm, but an integral part of the infrastructure at tech companies. A recent study predicts that the overall cloud system expenditures of businesses will reach $81 billion by 2022. These systems not only enhance existing data centers but can replace them as well.

How to Lift and Shift

Most tech solutions are developed for businesses with advanced tech capabilities. However, almost 84% of companies are at the beginner or intermediate stage of being digitally equipped. All is not lost, though, because migration technology like lift and shift can speed up the digitization process for companies looking to scale up. While considering lift and shift data center migration, one of the key aspects to consider is carrying out extensive research and a plan for executing the migration. Not all data needs to be moved to the cloud. Technology and software that replace certain existing modes may prove beneficial instead.
 
Benefits

Lift and shift migration boasts a host of benefits, including being a quick and affordable way to migrate data. In lift and shift, the speed factor can be noted by the amount of time and money saved in deployment and migration. This minimizes the downtime involved in data transfer from on-premises to the cloud. Without the need for coding and making changes to the system, you aren’t paying for extraneous processes. This translates to cost savings in terms of data center migration.

Compared to other migration models, lift and shift offer the benefit of reduced planning needed for application moving. There is a lower risk associated with migration because apps do not need to be reconfigured. It has never been easier to optimize on the cloud than with moving data to the cloud. This allows for a greater degree of optimization that cuts back on costs and workload effort.

Drawbacks

The benefits of lift and shift cloud migration eclipse the cons. Cloud environments do not provide all the advantages of a full-featured native platform. This does not mean they perform at a lower capacity, but that they are not designed primarily for this function.

Custom-made applications for companies are harder to migrate, as they are specifically designed for a company’s unique needs. Unless these programs are modified before migration, they may glitch when expected to run in a cloud environment.