Lift & Shift Vs. Re-Platform

Understanding your workload goes a long way toward deciding when and what to move to the cloud. Companies have to decide when to lift and shift apps to the cloud without much modification, or when it’s worth re-architecting an application. Either option is often a good choice when major cost savings are involved.

We had one customer running dozens of SQL servers on physical servers. This customer could have simply lifted and shifted its database servers and applications to AWS with ease. However, we looked at leveraging hosted cloud database services as an alternative. This would require the application to be re-platformed with some architectural changes, but the ROI and ancillary benefits of the hosted cloud platform provided technological enhancements with significant cost savings. It took two of our developers about 30 days to handle the re-platform. The long-term savings? More than $50,000 per month.