Benefits of Lift and Shift Cloud Migration

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Migrating sensitive data from the data center to the cloud can be overwhelming. It gets challenging if you do not follow the typical data migration process flow, which can reduce the security, stability, and expense concerns related to the entire process. Cloud migration is favored by billions as a successful one reduces the costs while improving overall scalability and lowering the significant risk of cybercrimes that can derail businesses.

So, before jumping into the lift and shift migration benefits, let's take a quick look at the core concept of lift and shift migration.

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the simplest way to move your sensitive data, applications, business elements, and information from the data center to the cloud computing environment. You have already interacted with cloud facilities if your company uses Office 365, Zoom, Sharepoint, Gmail, or Google Drive.

It might feel like a physical movement, except that it merely involves transporting data and applications from your data center infrastructure to the cloud, be it public, hybrid or private. So, this lift and shift approach is nothing more than a move from a small office to a larger one.

But this requires a lot of preparation, proper knowledge, and advanced work for a successful migration. So is it worth your company's resources? Absolutely, as it ultimately helps in cost savings while improving flexibility and scalability for your business. Top options include Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc. These cloud computing vendors are known for offering excellent assistance in managing your IT infrastructure remotely without any security risk or inconvenience.

Benefits of Lift and Shift

One thing to know about cloud migration is that there are multiple ways to shift workloads from the on-premises data centers to the cloud. However, the most accessible and affordable method here is none other than the lift and shift data center migration. It refers to the strategy that enables companies to migrate their on-premises applications to the select cloud facility without redesigning. The aim is to migrate the applications to their original conditions with minimal or no changes.

The lift and shift approach offers greater flexibility than any other migration strategy and a varied range of attributes and facilities. It is useful when enterprises shift their apps with expensive hardware conditions or security issues.

Let’s take a closer look at the top benefits of employing this lift and shift method for cloud migration:

1. Increased Security

Why are companies shifting to the cloud? One of the key reasons to select cloud migration is due to its advanced security features over any of the known traditional network systems. The cloud comprises networks, systems, and applications that require configuration and secured maintenance, following the “shared responsibility” model.

In this model, service providers like Amazon offer their facilities along with excellent security policies. However, unlike the other available networks, Amazon's cloud offering was chiefly designed while keeping privacy and security as primary criteria. As per the survey from Microsoft Office 365, around 94% of SMBs appreciate such an advanced security policy which also enables the companies to store their data and information centrally with stronger privacy layers.

Look closely at DC Gears to find the top vendors offering cloud computing services worldwide. They even take care of complicated security problems like ensuring automatic privacy updates, keeping unwanted traffic outside the chosen zone to stop access to the machines on which your company stores sensitive data and applications, etc. For example, Amazon cloud services are available with compliance certifications like ISO27001, AICPA/SOC, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA. With the availability of such certificates, you can smoothly transition from data centers to the cloud without any security hassles.

2. Specific Security Access

Sometimes, damages to the physical machinery can cause much trouble to businesses. In addition, it can result in data loss and theft issues. These can be lowered by shifting to the cloud; you get to access it from anywhere due to the availability of cloud facilities.

However, one of the reasons for choosing the lift and shift method is that it helps specify your employees' access to selected applications stored within the cloud. As a result, it enables businesses to grow and expand with multiple opportunities from any location while meeting all the required operational requirements. Ultimately, your team gets to diminish unwanted downtime while speeding up the restoring services, even during outage situations. Overall, it helps in saving a lot of company resources along with your employees' valuable time and energy.

Along with these, logging and backup facilities are crucial in disaster recovery. The backups help get things right on track and run them successfully, while the logs are beneficial for getting all the critical data for risk assessment.

Once the entire migration process is completed successfully, the teams do not need to be present at the specific location for updates, deployments, or fixing any issues with the data center machines anymore. So, all-in-all, it creates a highly flexible option for deployment than the traditional on-premises setup, with easy collaboration with the entire team, from almost any location globally.

3. Reduced Business Costs

Cutting down the company expenses is one of the fundamental reasons for selecting the lift and shift method. It enables the companies to lower their operational costs, making no compromises with the IT processes. Here you just pay for what you use and do not have to invest a lot of money as the data center maintenance charges.

As per the reports by Microsoft Office 365, around 82% of SMBs reported being in the winning zone due to their reduced expenditures for adopting cloud technology, while 70% are keen on reinvesting their saved money back into their businesses, boosting more profits each time. Furthermore, a Datometry survey of 166 IT Leaders highlights that 61% of companies are shifting to the cloud to reduce operational expenses. Also, the reputed cloud facilities vendor VMWare estimates how the larger enterprises are saving around 40-50% on traditional IT operating costs by opting for the lift and shift from data centers to the public cloud.

Many corporations are interested in public cloud services as the host must offer the appropriate hardware for the web servers, including stack configuration, upgrades, security, and maintenance, along with other facilities. The “pay as you go” policy seems to be highly in demand for helping businesses to save their resources while getting the best services from public cloud hosts like Google, AWS, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. These vendors offer cooling, power, upkeep, staffing expenses per server unit, maintenance, and more, which are ideal for cutting down the annual IT budget on the company’s internal maintenance.

4. Resource Management for Better Scalability

Based on your IT requirements, your company must scale up or down and make appropriate business plans to support it. It gets smoother when you shift from data centers to the cloud. But, one thing you already know is how steadily technology changes, and something ideal for your company seems obsolete in a few years. So, it gets challenging to adapt to such ever-changing customer demands.

When you select cloud migration, you dramatically reshape your IT infrastructure and workloads to accommodate these demands, no longer dependent on your past assets and equipment. In addition, cloud service providers give you complete control to manage the resources per your business requirements, which seems impossible when you get into complicated contracts or the typical one-size-fits-all plans.

Such control over your business plans can help the company to generate more profits by saving the unnecessary expenses required to maintain the data centers. The lift and shift approach helps migrate the apps painlessly while assisting businesses to grow to deliver excellent customer experience and performance. Reducing overhead expenses while improving agility helps deliver increased efficiency and productivity while freeing up a lot of unused space and other company resources.

5. No Interruptions with Zero Security Risks

One of the reasons why companies prefer the lift and shift approach is due to the “no interruption in workflow” feature. As it is a kind of copy-and-paste action, hence there is no pause or changes made in the migration process. Also, the process is straightforward compared to the other modes of cloud migration and thus can significantly lower any risk of data migration disruptions and security loopholes.

6. Meet Deadlines with No Migrating Complications

Lift-and-Shift migration, the simplest process, lowers any unwanted complexities of data reorganization or restructuring, meeting all the short deadlines seamlessly. In addition, it simplifies user account mapping while helping with migration strategy planning without delay.

Also, this approach comes with no complications of migrating permissions. It seems easy to transfer the applications and related features like versions, comments, timestamps, external shares, etc. Since this process does not involve any data modification or addressing complex requirements like migrating specific embedded links, it can be an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes. If you need assistance finding the best cloud computing service provider, DC Gears can be your guide.

7. Lightweight Migration with Smooth Integration

Cloud migration is essential if you want to increase efficiency while handling forever increasing workloads, which can take a toll on the data centers over time. Keeping the infrastructure updated and functioning appropriately is a time-consuming, expensive job that can cost your company millions of resources without generating substantial profits.

Lift-and-Shift migration is a lightweight data migration option that involves replicating the data structure from the source to the cloud, making it the best hassle-free project deployment. In addition, streamlining each migration process step, including the pre-migration analysis, is easy.

How to do Cloud Migration?

The above section boldly highlights the key reasons for lifting your data and shifting to the cloud from conventional data centers. The list of benefits does not end here and seems to get more profitable with your vendor selection. Businesses need to lift and shift their data and apps to the cloud as early as possible to avoid any security risks later.

Improve your performance while reducing irrational expenses to generate profits with the top cloud computing vendors worldwide. In case of second thoughts, DC Gears can be your real escape. The brand is known for partnering with the best brands globally to bring you the finest network security and cloud computing facilities at pocket-friendly prices.

Depending on your business requirements, DC Gears can shortlist the appropriate vendor to offer you optimized scalability, increased security, greater access to business-critical functionalities, smarter integrations, etc. Find dedicated teams of professionals to help you to find the right lift and shift approach while ensuring that your data moves smoothly and efficiently with maximum protection to the cloud. Get on-site expertise, 24*7, from DC Gears. To get a quote, check out DC Gears.com.