6-Step Lift and Shift Migration Planning Checklist

Before embarking on a lift and shift migration to the cloud, it is crucial to create a planning checklist to evaluate feasibility and gauge business objectives. Balancing the business goals of the migration with the human and capital investments obligatory to migrate in the primary place is of critical importance. 

Without knowing the answers, your migration to the cloud could also be hampered by delays, wasted costs, or worse. A successful lift and shift migration is just not nearly your corporation; it is also about your customers and users.

To get probably the most out of a lift and shift migration, use this checklist to ask yourself these key questions. Doing so won’t just set your corporation up for fulfillment through the migration itself but in addition help realize significant customer and value advantages over time.

A lift and shift migration, also generally known as rehosting, is the technique of moving on-premises workloads to the cloud with none changes in code, architecture, or infrastructure.

Lift and shift migrations will be a superb way for businesses to reap the advantages of migrating to the cloud. By leveraging existing technology with minimal modifications, data centers can evolve from hardware-centric solutions to more dynamic ones that leverage virtualized environments.

There are numerous other advantages that include a lift and shift migration as well. A few of these include:

• Reduced Costs: Moving applications to the cloud may also help reduce capital expenditures by eliminating costly hardware purchases and implementation services. The savings also extend to ongoing operating expenses (e.g., power, cooling, and rack space) by reducing the necessity to keep up on-premises data centers.
• Increased Agility: With cloud services, businesses can quickly scale up or down as needed to accommodate changing business needs. This flexibility helps them keep pace with evolving customer demands and stay competitive of their industries.
• Improved Scalability: Cloud environments are highly scalable, allowing businesses to simply expand or contract their capability in response to current needs.

Overall, a lift and shift migration is a very important step for a lot of businesses seeking to benefit from the advantages offered by the cloud. 

Whether your goal is to cut back costs, increase agility, or improve scalability, migrating workloads to the cloud could also be the appropriate selection for you.

There isn’t any one-size-fits-all answer to this query. Every business is different and may have its own unique considerations when making the choice to migrate to the cloud. Nevertheless, there are a number of aspects you need to keep in mind when making your decision as a part of your lift and shift migration checklist.

• Fastidiously evaluate the prices of each on-premises and cloud-based solutions. This includes not only initial capital expenditures but in addition ongoing operating expenses, similar to power and bandwidth.
• Does your corporation need greater flexibility and agility? Through the use of cloud services, businesses can quickly scale up or all the way down to adapt to changing customer demands or evolving market conditions.
• Do you wish scalability? Cloud environments are well suited to businesses that must expand or contract their capability as needed.

Selecting the appropriate timing to your migration to the cloud is dependent upon when you have got the human and capital resources obligatory to achieve success within the migration. Whether it is the height season to your customers, for instance, then it is probably not an ideal time to allocate IT resources to a migration. But if you happen to are growing quickly and technical challenges get more significant by the day, then migrating as soon as is cheap may also help speed up growth and avoid significant future challenges.

Imagine it or not, not all applications needs to be migrated to the cloud. In some cases, migrating an application can result in a worse customer experience or increased costs. 

Some applications will need complete refactoring before migrating. This cost will be significant. Other burdens can add up if an application is migrated unnecessarily.

As a part of your lift and shift checklist, when selecting what applications to migrate, first confirm if doing so will help your corporation see significant advantages. Higher application performance and security will profit your customers. Optimized infrastructure costs profit your corporation. Reduced IT complexity advantages everyone, especially your IT team. 

Take care to substantiate that the advantages outweigh the burdens when deciding which applications to migrate to the cloud.

As we suggested above, creating an ideal customer experience is crucial to the success of any business. And since customers are flocking to online services and mobile apps, it’s vital for businesses to maintain up up to now with the newest technological trends.

At the identical time, migrating applications can have an effect in your customers’ experiences. For instance, in some cases, the cloud accelerates service delivery. In other cases, performance could also be impacted for the more severe. Moving to the cloud will sometimes make customer data less secure than in a non-public environment. 

The way you manage customer expectations and the client experience after the migration goes a great distance in the general long-term success of your migration. This has a downstream impact on your corporation as well. Happier customers help your corporation grow, while dissatisfied customers will churn elsewhere. 

Generally, the cloud improves performance. In any case, why would you migrate to the cloud if not to enhance business outcomes? Generally, security and data concerns will be allied within the cloud. 

It’s vital to pay attention to the impact of migration on customers. Unspooling a sophisticated migration since you failed to guage an important thing – how your customers will respond – can have drastic business implications.

A successful lift and shift migration to the cloud doesn’t occur by accident. It’s essential to have a planning checklist in place before starting the method. This plan should include prioritizing which applications to migrate and understanding the potential impacts on customers.

Identifying key milestones and a test process is integral to planning to your migration.  By understanding what must be done and when, you’ll be able to avoid potential pitfalls and set your migration up for fulfillment.

Assigning a single project manager for the migration is an ideal method to make certain competing priorities and timelines don’t derail the migration. Moreover, factor your budget into the migration plan. Having to halt the lift and shift migration due to budget or timing restrictions that weren’t addressed within the planning checklist can have disastrous effects.

One in every of the important reasons organizations migrate applications to the cloud is the expected cost savings. It’s true that in lots of cases, a move to the cloud brings performance improvements at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). That said, latest costs can reveal themselves when you make it to the cloud.

For instance, numerous applications should be modified once they move from traditional infrastructure to the cloud. The prices of refactoring or completely redeveloping an application can add up over time.

Evaluating costs (and potential savings) only on the infrastructure level is a mistake. Take care to account for all present and anticipated costs as much as possible as you choose if and when you need to migrate to the cloud.

Once you’ve got lifted and shifted your applications, you will want two primary varieties of management and maintenance. As mentioned before, the applications themselves will need some attention and care once they have been migrated to the cloud. From patches and updates to full-scale refactoring, each application would require resources.

So, too, will the infrastructure itself. For the ample advantages and benefits provided by leveraging the cloud, the underlying infrastructure still requires management and maintenance. Even public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers like AWS and Azure don’t operate on their very own.

Before your migration, you need to have a plan for who shall be managing your cloud infrastructure and the associated costs. Whether using an internal team or partnering with Liquid Web, a key component of your migration’s success will rest on how well your infrastructure performs and the way well it’s secured post-migration.

Ultimately, the important thing points to think about before a lift and shift migration are whether it’s the most effective selection for your corporation, whether it is going to profit your customers, and if you have got the resources needed to achieve success within the migration process and beyond. 

By taking all of those aspects into consideration, you’ll be able to make sure that your move to the cloud is as seamless and cost-effective as possible.

Liquid Web has provided cloud solutions to mid-sized businesses and enterprises for 25 years and counting. From private cloud environments to hybrid infrastructure that leverages the general public cloud and Liquid Web’s cloud deployments, our team of expert engineers and designers can deliver the cloud solution you require. 

Contact us here to learn more about succeeding with a lift and shift migration with Liquid Web.