Small, medium-sized, and large companies have begun adopting cloud computing due to its undoubted business benefits. However, it involves moving your data and applications to the cloud in a process known as cloud migration. You can have your in-house team handle the work or outsource it to a company that specializes in cloud migration. Whatever you decide, it is essential to have a good cloud migration strategy. A popular one that you might want to consider in the life and shift migration strategy.

What are the lift and shift cloud migration?

As the name suggests, lift and shift cloud migration involves lifting the data and applications you have hosted on the on-premise infrastructure of your company and shifting them directly to the cloud. The process is also known as rehosting. In it, you do not make any major changes to the data or the applications. You are just moving everything from one place to another as it is. The strategy is popular as it saves time and resources. However, before you decide to adopt the lift and shift cloud migration, you might want to know about its pros and cons.

Pros of the lift and shift cloud migration strategy

If you are still wondering if you should adopt the lift and shift cloud migration strategy to move your company’s data and applications to the cloud, you might want to know about the following benefits:

It is time-saving

Since you do not have to make extensive changes to the data and applications before moving them to the cloud, the entire cloud migration process is quick and time-saving. Your applications will not suffer any downtime, and the move will not affect the end users’ access to the applications. Your business productivity will not be affected.

It is cost-effective

You do not have to put your in-house resources to make changes in the data or applications or hire external specialists for the purpose. That means the cloud migration is not going to increase your expenses. You can optimize the costs further by moving the data and applications simultaneously, without going back and forth and increasing the workload. Additionally, you do not have to set up virtual machines to facilitate the migration process.

It does not require extensive planning

The typical cloud migration process can require extensive planning and data backups. You also have to inform your employees and customers in advance about possible downtime in applications during the migration. However, with the lift and shift cloud migration strategy, none of this is necessary. The process only involves moving the applications and data from the on-premise infrastructure to the cloud.

It does not pose any risk to the applications

You do not have to worry about applications malfunctioning during the move. Since you are moving the applications without changing their configurations, they will remain unaffected. The end-users will not have any troubles using the applications either.

It offers security and compliance

The cloud service provider will handle the cloud security and compliance issues, so you do not have to worry about these. The service provider will also regularly update the security features, ensuring fewer to no risks to your data in the cloud.

Cons of the lift and shift cloud migration strategy

The drawbacks of the lift and shift cloud migration strategy are as follows:

There might be performance issues

While you are not likely to encounter any glitches when moving your applications to the cloud, you might experience performance and resource utilization issues afterward. These generally occur because you did not build the migrated applications to work in a cloud environment in the first place. So, when you use the lift and shift migration strategy to move them to the cloud, it is unrealistic to expect to work just as well as applications built to work in the cloud.

There might be issues with moving custom applications

If you have custom-built applications for handling specific company operations, you might face difficulties in moving them to the cloud as they are. You might have to spend time in modifying them to make them work in the cloud. If that is too troublesome, you can decide to continue hosting them on the on-premise infrastructure.