Why migrating to the cloud is just the beginning

One of the most common patterns for cloud migrations is “lift-and-shift”, and for good reason: this approach minimises the number of variables in the initial migration process.

By avoiding dramatic changes in the infrastructure architecture between your legacy environment and the cloud, you are less likely to run into unexpected issues when starting to operate in the new cloud-based world. It also means you’ll be able to pull the plug in your old data centre sooner, and start to reap the benefits of potentially lower operational costs.

Getting to the cloud this way, however, is just the start.

Because you’ve avoided doing changes to your infrastructure and application patterns in the migration process, you’re not - by design - taking advantage of modern cloud-native patterns such as serverless, pay-per-use cost modelling, and automatic scalability.

I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to include a cloud-native refactoring programme as a follow-up to any cloud migration exercise. Some of the items in your roadmap will be low-hanging fruit - like replacing your self-hosted databases with Amazon RDS - and some will require more work, such as refactoring a legacy web application to be stateless.

You will only begin seeing the true benefits of your cloud migration when you start systematically replacing legacy components with cloud-native alternatives - and both your CFO and your development teams will love you for it.