Lift and shift is the most expensive approach disguised as the cheapest. Replatforming without rearchitecting gives you a cloud bill with none of the cloud benefits. We plan migrations workload by workload and execute them without downtime or surprises.
Cloud migration fails in predictable ways. The "move everything" approach produces a cloud bill larger than the data center costs it was supposed to replace, because applications designed for fixed infrastructure consume variable resources inefficiently. The "lift and shift everything" approach moves the problems to a more expensive location without solving them. The "rearchitect everything first" approach takes two years, costs three times the estimate, and paralyzes feature development. The right approach is portfolio-based: assess each workload individually and match the migration strategy to its future.
We evaluate every application and service against five migration patterns: rehost (lift and shift for workloads being retired within 18 months), replatform (containerize and move to managed services for workloads with a multi-year horizon), refactor (rearchitect for workloads where cloud-native patterns deliver material benefits), repurchase (replace with SaaS where the build-vs-buy calculus has shifted), and retire (turn off services nobody uses but nobody has had the authority to decommission). Each workload gets the strategy it deserves, not the one that is simplest to plan.
Execution is phased and risk-managed. Non-critical systems migrate first to build team confidence and validate the tooling. Data replication runs in parallel for weeks before cutover. Performance baselines (latency, throughput, error rates, cost) are measured before and after each phase. Rollback plans exist for every migration step, tested before they are needed. We have migrated from on-premises data centers, from one cloud provider to another, and from legacy hosting environments with expiring contracts and minimal documentation.
The constant across every migration is discipline: plan workload by workload, migrate incrementally, validate at every step, and never cut over without a tested path back. The teams that follow this discipline finish on schedule. The ones that skip validation steps finish late and over budget, after the production incident nobody planned for.
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