Think strategy: Lift and shift is an approach, one among many, for migrating your apps to the cloud. It means moving an application and its associated data to a cloud platform—without redesigning the app.
There’s no one-size-fits-all transition for moving an application from your on-premises data center to the cloud. But there are acknowledged core migration paths; many consider lift and shift (AKA rehosting) one of them. It’s a way for companies to protect their investments in business workflow, logic, and data trapped in on-premises hardware.
The lift-and-shift approach opens paths to IT modernization by moving to an open and more extensible architecture in the cloud. Companies consider lift and shift for solid business reasons, including reduced costs and improved performance and resiliency.
However, one enterprise strategist offers 4 reasons to re-consider lift and shift to the cloud. He contends that applications perform and evolve relative to their environments; and that the cloud provides superior size and diversity of services versus on-premises data centers.