Moving Beyond Lift-and-Shift Migration to Successfully Leverage the Cloud

For most businesses operating in today’s digital environment, moving even their most mission-critical workloads is becoming increasingly dependent on how quickly they can do it rather than on whether they are ready and willing.

Cloud environments provide increased availability and agility, easy and flexible scaling, and innovation that keeps accelerating digital transformation. IT teams can focus on initiatives that are more critical rather than focusing on the monotonous burden of architecture and platform management, such as upgrading end-of-life equipment.

Public cloud systems are not only better than their on-premises counterparts by these standards, but they are also more cost-effective, converting substantial capital investments into more reasonable operational costs.

Additionally, there are chances for strong and competent vendor engagement that can help companies in updating their IT infrastructure while limiting the number of new development throughout the transformation.

Also Read: Managed Service Provider’s (MSP) Role in Defending the Organization’s IT Infrastructure

Most businesses now choose to move the majority of their workloads—or eventually all of them—to a cloud environment, whether it be a hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud environment. Infrastructure is generally an established area with many best practices available while migrating and modernizing the data, pushing forward the correct security where organizations need to put extra effort to ensure they are prepared for this new environment.

Benefits and Pitfalls of the Lift-and-Shift Approach

Lift-and-shift migration is a common strategy used by businesses when moving their workloads to the cloud. This may appear like the best course of action in the short term because data center closure dates are approaching, and it may seem simple and inexpensive. However, it should only be considered a temporary solution.

Compared to temporary short-term gains, some of the risks might be extremely daunting. Customers cannot expect they will have the crucial data and application visibility they have become accustomed to using the lift-and-shift method once they migrate to the cloud. To fully profit from cloud computing, wise businesses will be proactive in addressing this. Lift-and-shift otherwise can increase a company’s threat surface, leaving it vulnerable to data breaches and massive fines.

Thankfully, there are alternatives to this approach that provide visibility, compliance, and control throughout and after the migration process:

Replatforming

This strategy offers a cost-effective alternative to lift-and-shift that is appealing. By using this technique, it is possible to make modest adjustments to the application codebases and shared data stores before they are moved, ensuring that they will function at a high enough level when they are installed inside this new public cloud environment. This strategy contributes to backward compatibility, enabling developers to maintain and utilize well-known legacy resources and capabilities. However, the cloud can differ from on-premises environments to the point that such legacy resources and capabilities aren’t always compatible with or best suited to the cloud.

Refactoring

Refactoring is a method that advances re-platforming by allowing IT teams to make significant changes to the application codebase while utilizing the cloud-native capabilities of the cloud provider. This makes sure that applications benefit more effectively from the new environment. Furthermore, it is frequently chosen when the app in question is crucial to the operation of the company and calls for the improvement of features, scalability, or performance. However, this could result in the significant abandonment of legacy code.

Also Read: Why Multi-Cloud Networks Need to Employ Cloud-Native Security

The Way Forward

New problems present themselves once a strategy has been chosen. Applications in an organization may be in various phases of modernization, but security teams must keep an eye on them all for any unusual behavior that might point to a breach. Although native security technologies are provided by cloud providers, businesses cannot rely on them to standardize and maintain their digital defenses. To safeguard their cloud migration, security leaders must be proactive.

Lack of security alignment and the requirement to use services that are not offered on-premises are often the difference between an effective cloud migration and one that leads to expensive data breaches and fines.

The appropriate project roadmap places a high priority on protecting sensitive data while ensuring that projects are completed on time and under budget. No matter their state of modernization, this method ensures the security of all applications and data.