Flaws with the Lift and Shift Approach

Organizations are increasingly making the decision to migrate their IT operations to a Cloud environment for a variety of reasons, including flexibility, cost, lack of application expertise and security. This involves transferring data as well as any applications and operations within physical servers.

When it comes to the transfer of the applications, Lift and Shift – also known as Rehosting or a Forklift approach – is viewed as a faster approach. However, faster does not mean better and can be very costly. Imagine moving across country and paying to transport all of your garbage. Then, when you arrive, you throw your garbage away at your destination. This makes no sense, but companies do it every day, causing all of the extra fees paid to a Cloud provider – monthly – for their unnecessary technical, dead and redundant code.

Some companies believe that – to avoid downtime and reduce licensing costs – Lift and Shift is their best option. It is not. The AveriSource team uses its proprietary platform to ensure businesses fully maintain their operations while a digital modernization occurs in parallel. Only companies that have been through AveriSource’s digital modernization process believe it because they lived it. The rest simply do not know we exist – yet!

Reasons Not to Lift and Shift to the Cloud

Sooner or later, assets that have been lifted and shifted into a new environment will need to be redesigned to take full advantage of the available cost-efficiencies. By simply rehosting applications in a Cloud environment, applications may not be optimized to take advantage of the new environment, which can result in companies negating some of those expected cost savings due to inefficiency.
Custom Built Applications are also harder to move. Complex programs that are especially resource-intensive create much greater challenges. Since most of these programs are custom-built to address a company’s specific needs, they are often not able to operate effectively in a typical Cloud environment without modification.
Changes to your applications are another consideration. It is important to understand that another difficulty of shifting legacy applications from an on-premises solution to the Cloud is that Cloud architecture is much different from traditional software architecture. Traditional applications tend to consist of a single, monolithic program that contains everything needed to run the application. Cloud architecture is less centralized. It breaks programs into multiple components, all running on different virtual machines or containers, each one instanced from a pool of processing resources as needed. This is partially what gives the Cloud its scalability and makes it so adaptable.
Shifted applications may not be able to allocate processing power effectively, rendering them slow and unresponsive. If the application is using more processing and memory in the Cloud, then any cost benefits of shifting to the Cloud could quickly be negated by the increased demands.
Legacy commercial applications have the benefit of drawing upon a base of knowledge from a company’s past. An application may not be able to run outside of its current infrastructure, forcing IT personnel to develop extensive workarounds just to get the application online, regardless of inefficiencies. Worse yet, it may create a new set of problems and errors that IT experts will spend months cataloging, diagnosing, and resolving.

Transitioning IT infrastructure into a Cloud environment is the perfect opportunity to rethink the role of IT personnel in an organization. With the enhanced reliability of Cloud-based services, IT professionals can spend less time troubleshooting infrastructure and more time innovating new solutions that help drive business growth. Traditional IT teams are often very siloed, with some handling a development role and others focusing on day-to-day operations. A shift to the Cloud can break down these barriers and unleash the creative potential of IT specialists.

When evaluating all of the challenges of a Lift and Shift approach, the AveriSource team believes the solution is very clear: focus on a Quick, Complete, Correct, and Cost-Efficient process.

Digitally modernize your Legacy Software with the AveriSource Platform. Call us to learn more.