The 6 R's of Cloud Migration

Rehosting is often referred to as Lift & Shift. It is the simplest way to move your on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud, requiring the fewest changes to your workloads and ways of working.

A replatform migration is similar to rehosting applications in the cloud, but involves some changes to the application to take advantage of the new cloud infrastructure. The core architecture, however, remains unchanged.

Refactoring involves moving applications to the cloud infrastructure while rebuilding them to fit better in the cloud environment. This can add functionality, scale and performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the existing environment.

Many standard applications are already available today as Software as a Service (SaaS). As a result, many customers stop managing their installed applications in their legacy infrastructure and instead use these applications as SaaS.

Some applications are no longer needed at all. It is therefore important to identify these before migrating to the cloud, so you don't end up spending unnecessary effort on an application that delivers no value to your organization.

Finally, your portfolio may contain applications that are critical to your business but require significant refactoring before they can be migrated. These applications are set aside for now and revisited at a later point.