“Lift and Shift” has proven a worthy approach for many companies who are looking for a fast, low risk way to move their workloads to the cloud. But what if you had an incremental option to lift and optimize your underlying infrastructure as part of your cloud journey?

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Remember those early days of virtualization and virtualized infrastructure which promised greater control, reduced costs and improved agility? Fast forward ten years to 2019 and cloud computing is the new follow-on technology that holds similar promise - and more.

However, just like the virtual idyll, cloud can represent a daunting journey. Forced to re-evaluate their assets, IT decision makers face mounting pressures. They’re feeling the urgency of cloud and cloud migration on multiple fronts.

While agile competitors and new market entrants threaten to snatch market share, enterprises are becoming less interested in the slow, gradual approach of digital transformation. At the same time, many IT decision makers are also hesitant to pursue a speedy migration because they’re afraid of the potential risk.

Lift and Shift?

Finding ‘quick wins’ by moving a workload as-is from on-premises storage to the cloud is a proven way to speed up, as well as kick-start, the process of cloud migration. Applications are effectively ‘lifted’ from the existing environments and “shifted” as-is to to the cloud. As such, there are often no significant changes to make in the application architecture, data flow, or authentication mechanisms.

This is known as the “Lift and Shift” approach. Oftentimes we see it form one of the core migration paths for many companies who are onboarding to cloud.

But let’s take a step back and look at four ways you can migrate your existing workloads to the cloud, according to AWS:

  • Rehost (lift and shift)

  • Replatform (lift, tinker, and shift)

  • Repurchase (drop and shop)

  • Refactor/re-architect

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, so if you were to ask a cloud migration specialist which one is best, they’ll most likely say, “It depends.” The drivers for choosing the right cloud migration approach range from using the least-disruptive approach to application compatibility, risk management to ROI, performance to cost. Understanding the different components in the application architecture and how they interact with each other over different interfaces it an important factor when deciding on the best approach.

Lift and Optimize - The Best of All Worlds:

“Lift and Shift” has proven a worthy approach for many companies who are looking for a fast, low risk way to move their workloads to the cloud. But what if you had the incremental benefit of lifting and optimizing your underlying infrastructure as part of your cloud journey?

This approach is what we here at RiverMeadow call ‘Lift and Optimize’. It wins time and again for our clients by radically shortening the time to value and enabling transformation as you migrate. There’s no downtime. Enterprises that take this route with the right partner can go straight into working in the cloud with immediate benefits which have occurred during the migration process.

Here's a quick overview of the approach:

Lift: Start with specialist tools for preflight validation, testing, automation and safe cut-overs prevalidate mission critical applications in the cloud prior to actual migration

Optimize: incrementally retire technical debt by evolving a workload as it lands in the cloud:

  • Upgrade Windows Os’s to supported versions

  • Swap out management and monitoring tool-chains

  • Deliver workloads into management tooling and strategies

Lift and Shift remains at the heart of a well-planned migration, but Lift and Optimize goes beyond that. It minimizes cost and resolves over-provisioning problems quickly, both prior to the migration and once you’re in the cloud, enabling a fluid yet controlled transformation experience.

Lift and Optimize with RiverMeadow:

Find out how our customers have benefited from our transformational approach to cloud migration with the following capabilities:

  • Upgrade Windows OSs to supported versions

  • Swap out management and monitoring tool-chains

  • Deliver workloads into management tooling and strategies, both native AWS and Azure and existing tagging strategies or via Partners such as Cloud Ranger for back-up and scheduling

With our flexible, fixed-price Multi-Cloud Migration Services and Advanced Product Capability we automate the process of upgrading Operating Systems of migrated workloads (clones) to bring the OS up to a supported version, leaving the original source intact, in service and unaffected:

•  Applies to Windows 2003 SP2 and above

•  Windows nano or headless are not supported at this time

•  Supports any standard Microsoft supported upgrade path (eg no 32-bit to 64-bit upgrade)

•  Customer is responsible for application compatibility

•  No impact on source workloads

•  All automation runs on clone of source in the target cloud to preserve rollback

•  Customer UAT’s applications before cutover

RiverMeadow - Your Trusted Cloud Migration Partner:

You need a cloud migration provider to navigate costs and technical challenges. Among the top 10 cloud migration providers featured in ITPro Today, RiverMeadow is a fast, secure, automated cloud onboarding solution with managed migration services that leverages APIs to mirror current server environments and move them into public, private or hybrid clouds without interrupting current workload function and performance.

Here’s how enterprises benefit from RiverMeadow’s SaaS-based Cloud Migration Platform and Managed Migration Services to transform their cloud journey:

  • Rapid migration times accelerate customers’ cloud adoption and time to value

  • Short, predictable downtimes ensure maximum application uptime for continuous 24/7/365 operations

  • Tested and proven over hundreds of successful migration projects with global brands, resellers and service providers

A successful cloud migration ensures both speed and near-zero risk. Enterprises can’t afford to have downtime or wait for snags to smooth out. At RiverMeadow, we don’t touch the live copy at all so you can test to your heart’s content on the cloned copy in the cloud until cutover. The copy on-premise stays live until you cut over to the cloud version, after all the testing is complete. Your business runs effectively as normal. No disruption, no downtime.

Once the data is in the cloud, re-engineering those applications becomes easier. There’s no need to buy new hardware. Users can create any VM in seconds and use that machine for as long as they need it.

To learn how RiverMeadow can help transform your applications and workloads as you migrate to cloud - faster, more cost-effectively and with lower risk - request your personal demo today.

RiverMeadow: Power to Cloud with Confidence.