Lift and Shift Migration - Advantages and Challenges

One of the best ways to modernize your application is by migrating the existing workloads to the cloud. Known as the Lift and Shift approach, it can transform your IT landscape by becoming more agile and optimizing operations. Today we will look into the benefits and challenges of this method to better understand the use cases which we will be discussing in our next week’s post.??

So first let’s start with the basics.??

What is the Lift and Shift migration approach???

This is a strategy to migrate an application along with its associated data to a highly available and scalable infrastructure without changing its core architecture. Transitioning to such an infrastructure, this approach can bring multiple benefits to the business such as enhanced speed, increased flexibility and reduced costs.??

Advantages of Lift and Shift?

Highly Secure Infrastructure??

Cyberattacks can lead to huge losses and are often caused due to minor exploits in the infrastructure. Shifting to a cloud environment, any business can take advantage of the highly secure infrastructure that the providers offer along with the advanced security tools such as two-factor authentication and access controls.??

Cost-Effective?

If approached using the right strategy, workloads can be migrated without downtime using small teams. Lift and Shift is a highly cost-effective approach which can quickly achieve the migration, reducing the effort of refactorization.??

Highly Scalable?

Switching to an operational expense, any business would be able to utilize this pay-to-go model to make their application highly scalable and grow globally. By leveraging the general advantage of the cloud, through simple lift and shift migration, the company can increase its ROI in terms of its overall IT expense.??

No Major Architectural Changes?

Re-architecting applications take large teams and much time. Since we lift the entire application and shift it to the cloud, its inner structure remains intact without any need for additional resources and even without new efforts to train the user on a modified/new platform.??

Challenges of Lift and Shift?

Hidden Costs?

One of the trickiest justifications for cost-benefit can usually be seen after multiple years of using the infrastructure when optimization efforts have significantly reduced the costs. The lift and shift approach might not be suitable for your application and can even require further effort into making after the shift changes which would not have been factored in.???

Security Risks??

Transfer of access rights and migration without any modifications from the on-prem setup. Due to the added complexities of the cloud, those access rights can be exposed and make the entire application vulnerable to outer threats??

Performance Issues?

An on-premises that has been heavily tweaked for optimization might not transfer well after migrating to the cloud. While cloud infrastructure would be better in terms of making the entire application more scalable and available, such tweaks might be slowing it down.??

This concludes the first part of our two-part article on Lift and Shift. In the next article, We will be discussing the use cases for which this approach is best suited and the phases involved while doing this type of migration.??