Cloud Migration Approaches and Their Pros and Cons: What You Should Know

What Is Cloud Migration? Cloud migration is the process of moving some or all your digital operations to your cloud. There are three main types of cloud migration you can perform — on-premises to cloud, cloud to cloud, or cloud to on-premises. When performing any of these three migration types, there are five methods and strategies you can use.

Unraveling the Mysteries of the First Three strategies in depth, with their pros and cons.

1.??? The Lift and Shift Migration Approach and Its Pros: A Closer Look

Lift and shift, on the other hand, is simply dropping an application into the cloud and hoping for the best. For many workloads, lift and shift is possible, and cloud vendors such as AWS and Azure are doing their best to make it as simple as possible. One of the most important steps to make lift and shift actually work is to make sure that the application, which was running locally until recently, still has the same document and data access once it’s in the cloud.

The Impact of Lift and Shift Migration on Your Business

Advantages

• No code or architecture changes
• Migrate critical core services quickly and directly, which presents minimal risk and disruption to business activity
• Easier compliance and security management

Disadvantages

• Does not take full advantage of the cloud
• On-premises applications may face latency or performance issues post-migration due to their lack of optimization for the cloud
• Migrating an application with known issues may increase the risk after migration
• The migration process may fail if the organization fails to accurately map application requirements to the corresponding cloud configuration

2. The Refactoring Migration Approach and its Pros and Cons

What is Refactoring? Refactoring refers to the process of migrating applications to cloud infrastructure while re-structuring them to fit the cloud environment. It involves making changes to your existing software or a large portion of the code base in order to take advantage of the cloud’s features and flexibility and elasticity. Unlike other cloud migration strategies, refactoring requires application code changes and must be tested thoroughly to avoid regression in functionality. Additionally, the application must be built for better cloud resource utilization in order to avoid high costs. While refactoring is the most laborious and resource-intensive approach, it can yield the highest ROI once you’re in the cloud.

The Pros and Cons of Refactoring: What You Need to Know

Advantages

• Long-term cost savings
• Adapting to changing requirements
• The application's longevity is enhanced by isolating components and connecting them to high availability managed solutions, enhancing their resilience

Disadvantages

• Vendor lock-in - Cloud nativeness refers to the high level of integration of an application with the public cloud, resulting in a higher consumption of cloud features
• Longer time to show business value
• It requires advanced coding, automation, and DevOps skills
• High risk of errors in all aspects

3. The Replatforming Migration Approach and its Pros and Cons

The midway ground between the two approaches we discussed above is a replatform migration. It's comparable to rehosting apps on the cloud, but in order to utilise the new cloud architecture, the programme must be modified.

During replatforming, a few standard adjustments are usually made. As an illustration, consider the following: Modifying the program's interaction with the database to take use of automation and an elastic database architecture; Improving scalability and using reserved resources in the cloud environment with little to no code modifications.

Challenge Your Viewer: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Replatforming

Advantages

• Start small and scale as needed without committing to a large migration effort
• Cloud-native functionality—re-platforming allows applications to leverage cloud capabilities
• Cost effective and does not require a major development project

Disadvantages

• A replatforming project can become a full-scale refactoring project
• Stick to standard cloud components for reduced work, as specialized ones may require significant application changes and may not be worth the investment unless they add significant value
• Manual cloud workload management limits re-platforming, necessitating investment in basic automation for flexibility in cloud system operation