Enterprises are increasingly migrating their IT operations towards a cloud environment. The primary reason behind this is that cloud is driven by flexibility, security, cost considerations, etc. The migration can be done using various strategies—the most promising strategy among all lifts and Shifts.
What are lift and Shift?
Lift and Shift is a migration strategy that removes workloads and tasks from one storage location and places it at the cloud-based location. This strategy allows the enterprises to move their IT operations to the cloud without re-architecturing them. This post will explore the benefits of using lift and shift cloud migration and why they are suitable for your business.
Benefits of a Lift and Shift Strategy
Lift and Shift is one of the simples to conceptual cloud migration strategies. Along with that, the following are the benefits of using this strategy:
1. Quick migration
The most important feature of the list and shift strategy is that it offers a quick cloud migration process. It offers a faster migration method to take applications out of on-premise infrastructure and place them into the cloud environment. While migration is compulsory to plan and document everything so that no critical dependencies are overlooked, the actual process of replicating workloads and migrating them to a cloud environment is relatively quick.
2. Cost-Effective
Developing applications to run over the cloud is time consuming and expensive process. That’s because IT engineers have to do some difficult reverse engineering of the existing application to build and test a new version, which also requires a lot of time and expertise. This process is quite expensive, particularly if additional software tools and equipment are required. Still, it can be done relatively inexpensively, especially if the application can be easily optimized for the new environment.
3. Less Resource-Intensive
Duplicating an existing workload to the cloud requires additional resources during migration. But this doesn’t happen in the case of a lift-and-shift migration. It only requires a few resources to perform the data duplication. Any customization, upgrade, or refactoring that requires modifying, rebuilding, or recoding the application would require a whole lot more processing and storage capabilities. While this may be significant in some cases, if this resource-intensive work results in only a modest performance improvement, it is usually not worth the effort, especially if it is possible to optimize the application once it is in the cloud.
Conclusion
Lift and shift strategies help organizations run IT operations smoothly during and after. But most of the organizations feel they are not good for them. When companies understand the pros and cons of lift and shift migration, they can decide whether or not they should spend the time, effort, and expense to move their workloads directly to a cloud environment.
