The 6 R’s of Cloud Migration

Moving to the cloud is a journey. Enterprises/ organizations need to consider the below 6 cloud migration strategy to decide which cloud migration strategy suits their use case.

‍

Retire
Re-hosting
Refactoring
Re-platforming
Repurchasing
Retain

‍

Retire (Decommission)

If a legacy application is providing little value compared to its costs, it might be time for retirement.

Lots of legacy applications were originally built because there was no alternative at the time. A modern, readily available application – may be a cost-effective SaaS could replace the old one sufficiently and even replace multiple legacy systems.

‍

Re-hosting (Lift & Shift)

If a legacy application is providing good value but is expensive to run, it might be a candidate for re-hosting. Re-host “lift and shift” involves keeping the same basic functionality but moving to the cloud where it is easier and less expensive to run.

‍

Refactoring (Re-Architect)

It optimizes an on-premises application to support cloud architecture.

Migration involves high cost and efforts. Therefore, in the long run, this approach can be efficient and cost-effective. The application is re-engineered to use cloud-native features.

‍

Re-platforming (Lift & reshape)

This type of migration is similar to re-hosting but requires few changes to the application. Even though this approach closely resembles re-hosting. This categorized differently based on changes. For example, in doing such migrations, an organization may plug its application to a new database system that’s on the cloud or change its web server from a proprietary version.

‍

Repurchasing (Drop n shop)

Switching the legacy application in favour of a new but similar application on the cloud. Migrating to a SaaS-based system would be an example of such a migration where an organization may decide to migrate from its legacy financial system to a SaaS-based financial ERP system.

‍

Retain (No Movement)

In certain cases, the organization may decide not to touch certain applications and systems and to postpone their migration for later in the future. Moreover, the application is too critical for modification and require a more thorough business case analysis. Either way, it’s normal for organizations to not touch some applications and systems during their cloud migration efforts. However, in certain cases such as data centre migration, organizations may not have a choice and will have to consider one of the earlier described options.

‍