Three years ago, "cloud migration" meant lifting your existing servers and dropping them onto AWS or Azure. In 2025, it means something more sophisticated — and more valuable.
The 6 Rs of Cloud Migration
- Rehost (Lift & Shift): Move as-is. Fast, low-risk, minimal optimization. Good for getting off aging hardware quickly.
- Replatform: Make targeted optimizations. Move from MySQL on a VM to RDS. 20% of the effort of a full rewrite, 60% of the benefit.
- Repurchase: Switch to SaaS. Move your CRM from a self-hosted instance to Salesforce. Often the right call.
- Refactor: Rearchitect for the cloud. Microservices, serverless, containers. High effort, highest reward.
- Retire: Turn off what you do not need. An average enterprise discovers 20–30% of its applications during migration that nobody uses.
- Retain: Keep on-premise what has to stay on-premise. Regulatory requirements, latency needs, data sovereignty.
The Migration Playbook We Use
- Application inventory and dependency mapping — usually reveals surprising dependencies
- TCO analysis (Total Cost of Ownership) — cloud is not always cheaper, but it is almost always more flexible
- Choose your migration wave sequence — always start with low-risk, non-critical workloads
- Set up your landing zone — networking, security, IAM, cost management — before you move anything
- Migrate, test, optimize, repeat
The biggest cloud migration mistakes are not technical. They are organizational — not training the team, not establishing cost governance from day one, and not having a rollback plan.