Cloud Migration: Lift & Shift vs Modernization

Cloud Migration: Lift & Shift vs Modernization

Cloud migration projects are becoming increasingly popular as companies want to take advantage of the scalability, efficiency, and power the Cloud has to offer. As more and more companies have taken on Cloud Migration projects, two main strategies have surfaced: Lift & Shift and Modernization.

Lift and Shift

Lift and Shift focuses on migrating your applications to the Cloud in their current state. The benefit of Lift and Shift is that it reduces the number of changes that you have to manage during your project. It also gives you a good point of reference (your on-prem systems) to compare the outputs of your Cloud environment and ensure that the Cloud environment is producing the same outputs as your current on-prem applications. The downside to Lift and Shift is that it doesn’t take full advantage of cloud features, such as auto-provisioning, continuous integration/continuous delivery, containerization, etc.

Modernization

The Modernization approach combines the process of migrating your applications to the Cloud with enhancing your applications to leverage all of the benefits of the Cloud. The end result of a successful Modernization Migration project is a Cloud environment with applications that use the latest-and-greatest industry standards for the Cloud.? While there are advantages at the end of a successful Modernization project, the number of changes that are introduced in modernization can greatly complicate an already complex migration project.?

Here at Realist, we strongly suggest that you do both a Lift and Shift and Modernization, but not at the same time. One of the things that most impacts project difficulty is complexity. We have found that trying to combine a migration effort with a modernization effort creates too high a level of complexity. It also can remove your ability to verify your Cloud environment against your existing on-prem environment as the environments won’t be the same and may not produce the same outputs.

If you start first with a Lift and Shift project, you can avoid the added complexity of application changes. You also have a suitable mechanism for confirming that your Cloud environment is producing the same outputs as your on-prem applications. Once you have completed the Lift and Shift project, you can then start on Modernization and begin to modify your applications to take on the full benefit of the Cloud.

If you’re interested in learning more about what this means for your business, we would love to talk with you! Please use our contact us page to get in touch with us.