Everything You Need to Know About Lift and Shift Strategy: Part 1

Most enterprises are moving their IT operations to the cloud servers. There are various advantages of using cloud services like flexibility and cost savings. Thus, many companies are thinking to move their infrastructure from on-premise to cloud-based infrastructure. You need to move your data from on-premise infrastructure to your cloud server. Also, you need to move your applications to your cloud-based server. You can use the Lift and Shift strategy for moving your applications.

Definition of Lift and Shift:

This is also known as the forklift approach. This term is used for defining the strategy of moving tasks from one location to another. The best thing about this technique is that you can quickly move your applications. This is similar to the classic cutting and pasting technique. However, you need to do a lot of planning and documentation for executing this strategy. This will ensure that you can match the data sets with the new environment. Also, your applications will have enough resources to operate.

Advantages of Lift and Shift Method

1. Faster Migration

This is the most important advantage of lift and shift strategy. It is the fastest migration strategy available in the market. You can use this strategy for quickly moving your applications from on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud infrastructure. However, you need to carefully plan this whole strategy. Also, it is important to create a documentation of your whole strategy. This strategy is perfect for companies that can’t afford downtime. It will help then in quickly setting up a new environment. Thus, you don’t need to worry about service disruption.

2. Cost-Effective

It is very difficult to re-architect your whole application for the cloud platform. You need skilled IT engineers who can reverse engineer your entire application. Also, they need to build and test the new version of your application. This can take a lot of time. Also, you need a team of expert coders for reverse engineering your entire application. This additional labor can be very expensive for your company. You need to also buy additional tools for completing the reverse engineering process. If you are using lift and shift strategy, then you can quickly complete the migration process. Also, it is more cost-effective when compared to other migration strategies. You can directly optimize the existing version of your application.

3. Less Resource-Intensive

If you are replicating your workload, then you need extra resources for the migration process. However, lift and shift strategy only require resources for handling the replication. If you are tweaking or refactoring your application, then you need more storage and computing resources. This can be important for some of your legacy applications. However, you can optimize your application after moving it on your cloud.

These are the most important advantages of lift and shift strategy. However, there are also many other factors that you should consider before opting for this strategy. Some of the factors are:

1. It is difficult to move custom-built applications

You can easily move your commercial applications by using this strategy. However, it can be difficult to move your complex applications by using this strategy. These applications are usually more resource-extensive when compared to commercial applications. Enterprises create these complex applications for addressing their needs. Thus, it can be difficult to operate in your cloud environment. Your IT team needs to modify your complex applications. Sometimes you even need to use a hybrid cloud for running your complex applications.

If your program is dealing with big data, then you should re-architect the whole application. Thus, you can enjoy the benefits of cloud infrastructure. You can also modify your application after moving it to your server. However, you should modify it before rolling it out. This will help you in avoiding various performance issues. It can be very difficult to re-architect your whole application. Thus, it is a major disadvantage of using this strategy.

2. Legacy Systems

Most companies still rely on legacy technology. They are using their old systems for running their important applications. If you are still using legacy systems, then it is a good time to adopt cloud-based solutions. You need to move your sensitive data to the cloud. However, it can be very difficult to move your outdated applications.

There are many organizations that still need these legacy systems. These systems require more attention when compared to normal systems. Thus, they are not a good candidate for the lift and shift strategy. You can easily move your application data to your cloud storage. However, it can be very difficult to reconfigure these applications. If your applications are not configured properly, then they won’t align with your cloud datasets. Thus, you need to spend more time moving your applications. You can set up a multi-cloud environment for dealing with this problem.

3. Cloud Migration is a complete process

This strategy is a quick way of moving your applications to the cloud. You can directly host your applications on your cloud server. Thus, you don’t need to rebuild your applications or systems. However, these applications are not optimized for the cloud environment. You need to deal with various inefficiencies.

You need to redesign your applications after shifting them. This will help you in enjoying the cost-efficiencies. The good thing about this strategy is that you can make changes after moving the application. Thus, first, you can move your applications to the public cloud. After that, your IT team can redesign the entire application.

Conclusion

The lift and shift strategy is a simple way to move your applications to the cloud environment. There are many advantages of using the lift and shift strategy. It is more cost-effective when compared to other migration strategies. However, there are many challenges to using this strategy. You need to redesign your applications for removing the cost inefficiency. Also, you need to give more attention to your legacy applications. We are going to talk about the disadvantages of using this strategy in our next article. If you need more information about cloud migration, then you can contact Bleuwire.

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