All You Need to Know About Lift and Shift Migration

Quick Summary: There is no multipurpose approach for cloud migration that you can use in every scenario. But there are several ways that are commonly accepted for migration purposes and lift and shift is one of those strategies. This detailed guide sheds light on lift and shift migration with its meaning, benefits, stages, and more.

Most organizations with on-premises software and applications struggle to keep up with technological advancements and increasing customer demands. Challenges with scalability, complex management processes, high capital expenses, and constant hardware replacements are some reasons for their struggles.

Cloud computing has come out as a boon for organizations that reduce operational burdens and cut down on their IT budgets. The awareness about the benefits of cloud computing is increasing and the number of businesses opting for cloud migration is rising thereon.

More than 41% of business and tech leaders globally plan to increase investments in cloud solutions. This tells the whole story of the significance of cloud computing. However, when it comes to cloud migration, there are different strategies, and choosing the most appropriate one is crucial for successful migration.

Lift and shift are among these strategies that enable organizations to transition to the cloud by moving their on-premises applications as-is. There are many pros and cons of this cloud strategy. Let’s find out how it works and whether it’s feasible for you.

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What is Lift and Shift?

“Lift and Shift” alternatively “rehosting” is the migration of an application with its data from one environment to another environment, primarily to the cloud, without redesigning. So, this process allows you to migrate your data and applications residing on the on-premises data centers to the public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Benefits of Lift and Shift Migration

The lift and shift strategy offers many advantages and provides an effective way to move your IT infrastructure to the cloud. Let’s check the benefits for adopting the lift and shift strategy for cloud migration.

No Significant Changes

The lift and shift approach allows rehosting applications on the cloud without substantial changes. As a result, organizations can move their applications to the cloud without application re-architecting or additional costs. There is no need to refactor or rewrite the code with lift and shift. The application monitoring and management interfaces are also unaffected.

Ready-to-use Scalability

With Lift-and-Shift, you can scale your application easily and aren’t required to buy and physically install new computing resources. Besides this, you also need not provision extra hardware to handle heavy traffic.

Eliminates Disruption

You can migrate your application easily with the Lift and Shift model without having a large team for the process. In addition, the on-premises applications remain operational when migrating to the cloud, so there is no disruption in the service. The migration is smooth without affecting the application experience.

Improved Security

Security is crucial to gaining customer trust and ensuring protection against the menace of hacking and malware. After migration to the cloud, you will be able to leverage the multidimensional security of the cloud infrastructure and even utilize it for your legacy applications. Hence, security will improve for your applications with unified security methods, role-based access control, and user authentication based on different factors.

Improved Performance

By opting for the Lift and Shift process, you get the opportunity to utilize optimized and performance-driven computing resources without purchasing them yourself. Cloud services are available on a you-get-what-you-pay basis, so you can get higher computing power for your business by paying accordingly. Compared to your on-premises IT infrastructure, investing in cloud services is cost-effective.

Reduced On-premises Costs

As you move your applications to the cloud, the burden of on-premises gets minimized. It lowers your costs of managing and maintaining IT resources. It also removes the headaches of constantly monitoring and updating the infrastructure to meet modern business needs.

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Limitations of the Lift and Shift Strategy

It’s not the case that you will get the above benefits for all applications with lift and shift. While lift and shift cloud migration can provide a minimally disruptive and quick way for migrating applications to the cloud, it’s not free from challenges. Here are some limitations of lift and shift migration.

Unexpected Performance

Legacy applications that run from the on-premises environment are highly optimized to work to their full potential. Migrating these applications to the cloud may not always yield the expected results. Hence, applications running inefficiently or slowly within the on-premises environment are not likely to do better in the cloud without modifications.

However, many cloud services like Amazon AWS offer services that address performance issues. EC2 Auto Scaling with Amazon AWS helps organizations get better application performance. Apart from this, it also offers Amazon Aurora, a relational database service, and Amazon CloudFront, a low-latency CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Risks of Security

Applications designed for on-premises environments can be accessed by multiple users and there may be loose access rights. When you deploy mission-critical apps to the cloud, these access rights also get transferred to the cloud environment.

The cloud offers a shared and complex model, so deploying applications with loose access control may expose vulnerabilities. However, there are several ways to boost the security of your applications in the cloud environment.

You can utilize AWS services like AWS Key Management Services, Identity and Access Management, and Security Hub to beef up security.

High Costs

Shifting from an on-premises environment to a cloud environment will transform your capital expenditure into operational expenditure. Plus, partially optimized applications may not fully provide the benefits and savings of the cloud and could cost more in the long term.

You can achieve cost-effectiveness for your organization with AWS cloud services using AWS Savings Plans, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost Explorer. It allows you to monitor and optimize costs for cloud services. Calculate cloud migration costs to know the budgetary requirements.

How to Lift and Shift Enterprise Applications?

With the lift-and-shift process, you can move the exact copies of your servers, databases, and infrastructure to the cloud. However, a successful migration requires clearly defined steps to transfer your applications without breaking anything. Here are the lift and shift migration steps.

Assess Your Requirements

This migration process starts with an assessment of your current system and processes. The cloud vendor does the assessment to determine the feasibility of migration. After this, the vendor will utilize specific tools and software to discover and catalog your on-premises resources, also known as automated discovery.

The vendor will identify gaps in your system and determine the best possible solution that fills those gaps and offers application modernization.

Prepare for Migration

Once the assessment of your on-premises infrastructure is complete, the next stage includes preparation for the migration. Pay attention to different aspects and consider factors from the technical and the business sides. Don’t ignore the security aspect when assessing the new system for your IT infrastructure. You may also require training for the operations team to ensure familiarity with the new system.

Lift and Shift the Applications

When all assessments and planning are completed, you can move your on-premises applications to the cloud platform. Start by setting up the target environment, creating new accounts, and setting necessary user accesses. Set tools and software to migrate applications and their data to the cloud.

With Application Migration Service, you can smoothly move and improve in case of AWS lift and shift. It allows you to migrate your applications from any source infrastructure provided that it runs supported operating systems.

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Top Cloud Migration Approaches

There are many strategies for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Based on your application components and technical needs, some migration strategies may work best for you and others may not. Hence, you should consider various aspects before migrating your application to the cloud.

Rehosting

We have already discussed rehosting or the “lift and shift” migration strategy. It focuses on the speedy transfer of on-premises applications to the cloud and doesn’t require code changes. Organizations can move their applications as-is to the cloud or a different environment.

Refactor

Refactoring is a cloud migration strategy where the emphasis is placed on both speed and productivity. In this process, there are only minimum changes in code to allow applications to adjust to the cloud environment easily and make the best use of it.

Replatform

This is in between refactoring and the ‘lift and shift’ cloud migration strategy. The applications are moved to the cloud with minimal code changes in this strategy. However, the transfer of applications depends on factors like the target cloud service, specific requirements, and the application itself. With some code changes and adjustments, the applications are moved to the cloud, ensuring optimal performance and system compatibility. For example, PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) is a kind of replatform strategy for cloud migration.

Rebuild

Another way to migrate to the cloud is by rebuilding your application for the cloud platform. You can develop cloud applications for the PaaS platform as per your requirements. This is a heavy job since you have to consider various technologies and other aspects to build a cloud application for your organization. Nevertheless, it is essential when your applications have limited functionality or lifespan.

Rearchitect

Organizations looking to achieve scalability with the cloud can go with application rearchitecting. In this process, modifications are made to application code and features to provide scalability and performance. The application is revamped to meet the requirements of the cloud environment. The modifications include changes to application data infrastructure, architecture, and overall code.

Replace

You may have to replace your application with a ready-made solution if it fails to meet existing or future needs despite modifications. This is a faster way to deploy applications than rebuilding them from scratch for the cloud environment. However, there are some limitations of this migration strategy, including difficulty in application modernization and disruption in business processes.

Comparing Lift and Shift Model with Other Strategies

Lift and shift methodology is an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) migration model where your applications are moved to the cloud from your on-premises infrastructure without modifications.

However, in many ways, it is different from other strategies for migrating to clouds. There are two types of migration options you can choose from: PaaS and SaaS. There are many differences between IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS and each one is relevant in a particular scenario. Understanding their differences can help you choose the best option for your organization.

Let’s get a grasp on each of them and how they are different from the lift and shift process.

PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)

PaaS, which stands for Platform-as-a-Service, is a cloud platform to host, manage, and run applications. You can revise and optimize your applications for optimal use of this platform. Here you can leverage application refactoring, rearchitecting, and replatform methods to optimize applications and leverage cloud capabilities.

This strategy allows you to use modern architectures for your applications like microservices, containerization, and serverless with application rearchitecting.

Unlike the lift and shift process, which is fast and easy, PaaS requires more time and labor for the initial phase. Plus, it is costly as you have to spend money on the modifications of your application. However, the PaaS provides greater advantages of application security, resiliency, automation, etc.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

SaaS is a fast-growing cloud model and as per Statista, the total spending on SaaS services is expected to reach US $232 billion by 2024. This is a replacement strategy for cloud migration, where you can replace your existing on-premise applications with prebuilt cloud apps. SaaS is about acquiring applications from third-party cloud vendors.

SaaS offers an alternative to your on-premise applications that offer similar functionalities. It is a fast and low-cost method for cloud migration. The SaaS applications take full advantage of a cloud vendor’s infrastructure. It combines the benefits of lift and shift and PaaS migration with low cost and full platform potential.

However, in the lift and shift strategy, you can move your application as-is, providing benefits like greater control on your app and modifications to meet future needs.

When Should You Choose Lift and Shift Migration?

After knowing the benefits of the lift and shift migration strategy, now you may wonder whether it is beneficial for you or not. It is obvious to figure out if this strategy works for you. Here we will discuss in what scenarios lift and shift can be the right strategy for cloud migration for you.

• Quick Migration with Complete Infrastructure

Lift and Shift is for you when you want to move your entire infrastructure to the cloud and vacate your on-premises data centers. It allows you to quickly move your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud as there is little or no modification to your application. Hence, it provides a seamless approach to migrating your application to the cloud.

• When You Need a Highly Cost-effective Method

As you can move your application with almost no modifications, you save a lot by avoiding additional development expenses. Besides this, you also save on expensive license renewals and upgrades of components because the cloud infrastructure is maintained by vendors. With cloud vendors like AWS, cost optimization is a breeze as it offers AWS Cost Explorer that helps you understand, monitor, and manage your costs.

• Unfamiliar with Cloud-native Solutions

The lift-and-shift approach is an appropriate choice when you lack the knowledge of cloud-native systems that are constructed from scratch in the cloud. You can effortlessly scale your infrastructure to meet increasing demands.

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In ConclusionApplication modernization is the need of the hour to reduce costs, improve business agility, and stay abreast of market trends. Updating your on-premises applications to a cloud-first model requires a proper assessment of your requirements for the best options. Understanding benefits and risks of cloud migration before stepping into the process is vital for a prudent decision. The lift and shift approach makes app modernization seamless by moving your on-premises applications to the cloud.Radixweb has the expertise to help you migrate on-premises apps to the cloud with no extra effort. We offer application redesign, re-architecture, migration, and custom development. Our experience in cloud migration with lift and shift and other migration strategies enables us to offer end-to-end app modernization. Contact us and discuss your needs to begin the journey to cloud migration.