What are the 6Rs of Cloud Migration?

When looking to migrate your On-Premise IT Infrastructure and applications to the public cloud there are 6 strategies you can adopt. It is important to analyse your existing environment against the 6Rs so you can build out your public cloud migration plan.

1. Rehost

This is known as ‘Lift and Shift’, rehosting is often considered one of the easiest and least expensive ways to migrate an existing workload to the cloud as it involves taking the workload as it is and running it on cloud-native resources. The aim of Lift & shift is to provision, import, and deploy applications and infrastructure resources to match existing, on-premises architecture without modification in to the Cloud for an already Deployed landing zone.

When ‘Lift and Shift’ is done as part of a well planned migration involving a discovery and optimisation phase, it can deliver great results and cost savings. This is especially true in a large legacy migration scenario where the organization is looking to scale its migration quickly to meet a deadline (for e.g. a closure or end of lease of a datacenter) an can benefit from cost savings without any need to make any changes or optimise in the cloud.

Though it is not without its challenges. Detractors will tell you it can lead to inefficient and expensive cloud consumption as well as poor performance or data leakage. Whatever the case, lack of understanding of the cloud means that embarking on a ‘Lift and Shift’ approach should not be undergone without careful planning and support before migration.

2. Replatform

With a replatform, rather than lift & shift your servers ‘as is’, you can take advantage of the cloud migration to update your operating systems or databases, for example. It may be that you have outdated operating systems that are no longer supported by the cloud provider so deciding to replatform is an essential pre-requisite to migration.

3. Refactor

Is a solution involves redesigning the solution to take advantage of the latest PaaS and SaaS based technologies. Cloud optimized workloads that can be Refactored see reduced costs, reduced operational requirements, increased scalability and increased uptimes. Effectively an ‘application modernization may be considered as refactor, this is often one of the goals for using public cloud.

4. Repurchase

Repurchasing a solution is the migration strategy that involves changing the licensing model that is currently used for existing solutions. Microsoft Azure billing model is such that you only pay for resources when they are powered on. Application development stages like dev, test, UAT, etc. in an on-premises work load might require you to purchase a license for each application in that environment. In Microsoft Azure you would only pay for those licenses when those resources are powered on and provisioned. Additionally, for workloads that can easily be upgraded to newer versions, this repurchase model might allow a feature set upgrade as you move to the cloud.

5. Retire

Decisions to Retire workloads typically come out of the discovery process. This can often be the most challenging and time-consuming part of a cloud migration project, especially if your infrastructure is spread across multiple data centers or multiple teams. Knowing which assets are no longer required so that they can be switched off saves time and money in the long run as you won’t be paying for these redundant elements in the cloud and you can focus your attention towards maintaining the resources that are widely used.

6. Retain

You may want to retain portions of your IT portfolio because there are some applications that you deem unsuitable for the cloud - or you are simply not ready to make the move. In some cases when a server or IT service is still required and cannot be migrated to the cloud it makes the most sense to retain that server or service in its current position. This Retain methodology often times is used in a Hybrid cloud deployment that uses some on-premises IT servers and services combined with cloud technologies to offer a seamless integrated user experience. Retaining old solutions typically brings with it increased costs to maintain. In addition to hardware warranties that tend to become more expensive as spare parts become scarce, the organizational knowledge of those technologies tends to become increasingly scarce as people within the IT organization move into new roles.