A lift and shift migration means simply moving your data in its current state from on-premises to the cloud with little or no alteration. You can just copy your application from on-premises and ‘paste’ it into a cloud platform.
This approach enables you to migrate data without changing the app’s fundamental architecture.
There are some cases when a simple lift and shift can be considered useful. However, for the majority of cases, especially in the long term, this is not a suitable option. Disadvantages of this strategy include:
- Weak resulting architecture. Most businesses have an architecture that has been tried and assessed in the current environment. When employed in a new environment, the design highlights new and emerging issues, resulting in a weak end product that operates poorly for its users.
- Rollbacks. This issue arises when you are migrating the data as is as it includes any current liabilities and cloud resource constraints in the migration. Businesses have rolled back migrations because of concerns such as costs and resource requirements.
So, with that, we know a simple lift and shift is not likely to work and will just cause issues going forward. If your data were in the proper structure and correct location, then why would you move it? The whole reason to migrate is to improve and therefore, better your business.
For a successful migration, you will need to first cleanse the data, understand who owns it, engage with them and then move the data into a location that will scale it moving forward.
This process is not always easy, with many potholes along the way where the inexperienced could trip up. So here lies an opportunity to work alongside a valuable and experienced partner that can help you understand all options available, allowing you to make the right decision for your company.
This experienced partner will manage the business change, support your employees to understand what is happening, why, and how the data is moved, and will plan for scalability and future growth.
This is where Casper365 can help! Developed from years of our expert involvement with customers: understanding, and interpreting their data, Casper365 has been designed so that you can plan your migration by region or department and create a pre-migration report that can be used for sign-off.
Once signed off, the job can be scheduled, and migration will create a post-migration report to update you: what migrated successfully, if any issues arose and how they were resolved.
This allows you to use that data to communicate back to your own clients and talk to each department about migration. It also allows a complete audit trail as all data gets uploaded to a site collection on your tenant. This means in a year from now if someone asks a question relating to that data, you have it on record, ready to go.
Want to find out more about Casper365? Then get in touch with us and book your free demo today!