AWS Lift and Shift Migration
AWS lift and shift migrations can get your applications into the cloud relatively easily. The word “relatively” is important, because any migration to the cloud does require some degree of advance planning. It’s just that lift and shift tend to be the most straightforward way to get legacy systems into cloud infrastructure with the least degree of hassle. In particular, AWS lift and shift migrations offer five quick wins.
AWS lift and shift migrations get “quirky” applications in the cloud
In the early days of IT, documentation standards were very different from what they are today and in any case, back then, even in IT, “documentation” usually really did mean physical, paper documents, which were often expensive to print and were vulnerable to issues such as loss, fire flood and just degradation through age. This means that many older SMBs are probably going to have existing applications that need to be kept active for the time being but which cannot just be reworked for use in the cloud.
The standard workaround for this is to move to the cloud via a container (which virtualizes the necessary operating system) and thus allows staff to keep going and then build a new cloud-native application when there is available time and resources.
AWS lift and shift migrations give speedy access to cost savings
While it has to be said that lift and shift migrations are unlikely to give you access to all the cost efficiencies cloud-native applications can offer, they can still offer quite a lot in the way of reduced costs. In particular, they can allow companies to cut back on their in-house infrastructure, with all the IT-management issues that they bring with it. They also offer more scope for scaling up and scaling down, not necessarily to the same extent as you can with cloud-native applications, but certainly more than with traditional on-premise data centers.
AWS lift and shift migrations effectively eliminate the worry of hardware failures
In principle, AWS can experience hardware failures, in fact, it probably causes them all the time, but in practice, its customers are very unlikely to notice them, at least not to any meaningful extent. The only time this would be likely to happen is if AWS had a problem that effectively caused one of its data centers to go offline and since there are always at least two data centers in any Amazon region, all that would happen would be that all transactions would go through another data center (or centers) causing a potential increase in latency.
While this might be something of an irritation, it is highly unlikely to cause the same sort of hassle as hardware failures in on-premise data centers, especially if it involved legacy hardware, which would be difficult to replace. The alternative to taking the risk of hardware failure, especially legacy hardware failure, would be to go to the expense of buying spare parts which you might or might not need (and which might or might not work after a lengthy storage period).
AWS lift and shift migrations provide an effective disaster-recovery strategy
While the single, biggest driver of the shift to cloud services is probably the opportunities for reduced costs, disaster recovery probably isn’t far behind. A huge benefit of cloud computing over traditional disaster recovery strategies is that it shifts the emphasis from locations to services.
In other words, if staff are prevented from accessing their regular working location, they don’t have to find some way to get themselves to an alternative, physical site, they can just work from wherever they can get online. Not only does this save on the costs of maintaining an external disaster-recovery site, but it also eliminates the problem of your best-laid plans going wrong because your staff is unable to get to that, for example, if major roads are closed.
AWS lift and shift migrations provide a route to remote working
Even though this is last on the list of quick wins, it can still be a very major benefit. Cloud computing is known for its scalable nature and the reason that this is so valued is that companies of all sizes often have peaks and dips in their business cycles.
In addition to wanting to adjust their cloud services to match their business needs, they may also need to adjust their staffing levels. This may not be too difficult if a company needs “traditional” seasonal workers, especially at times when students are on vacation, but it can be quite a challenge if companies just want to have someone work for short and/or intermittent periods.
Basically, if you want someone to work on-site, then they have to be happy that the cost and time of the journey will be justified. When you move to the cloud, however, you have the option to support remote working, which can make it much easier to bring people (typically freelancers) on board for short “bursts”.
See Also