Data migration has become a key focus for businesses shifting to the cloud, but not all migration strategies are created equal. One such method, Lift and Shift, involves simply moving data and applications from on-premise environments to the cloud without significant modification. While this might seem like the quickest option, it’s often fraught with hidden costs, inefficiencies, and significant risks. In this blog, we’ll explore why Lift and Shift is an outdated, expensive, and risky approach to data migration—and what smarter, more efficient strategies look like.
Why Lift and Shift Data Migration is Old School and Expensive
Lift and Shift may seem like an easy way to get data to the cloud quickly, but it is, in fact, one of the most costly migration strategies. Here’s why:
- Excessive Data Transfer Costs: When you move everything as-is without optimizing or cleaning up your data first, you’re often moving redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data. This increases the amount of storage needed in the cloud, inflates network transfer fees, and results in higher cloud operating costs.
- Inefficient Resource Utilization: By not tailoring data and applications for the cloud environment, businesses often find that cloud infrastructure is misconfigured or over-provisioned, leading to underutilized resources and unnecessarily high costs.
- Lack of Optimization: Lift and Shift migrations don’t take full advantage of cloud-native features like auto-scaling, cost-efficient storage, or serverless functions, which could dramatically lower operational costs and improve system performance.
The truth is, Lift and Shift is a “quick-fix” solution that often ends up costing businesses more time, money, and effort in the long run.
Reducing Time: Eliminate ROT Before Migration
The first step in any successful data migration is to clean up your data before moving it to the cloud. Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (ROT) data is a common culprit that unnecessarily inflates storage and migration costs. It also complicates data governance and access in the cloud.
Eliminate ROT before migration by conducting a thorough data audit. Use automated tools to flag unused, duplicate, or outdated data. By eliminating ROT, you:
- Reduce the volume of data to migrate, saving both time and cloud storage costs.
- Streamline your cloud environment for better performance and easier management.
- Improve overall data quality, ensuring that only valuable, relevant data is moved to the cloud.
As a result, you speed up the migration process and make the entire transition to the cloud much smoother.
Reducing Cost of Cloud and Network Fees: Prioritize Migration by Data Owners and Applications
The cost of cloud services can quickly spiral out of control if you don’t strategically prioritize which data and applications should be moved first. Lift and Shift often moves everything at once, regardless of business priority or value, leading to inefficient cloud resource usage and excessive network costs.
A more cost-effective approach is to prioritize migration based on data owners and business value. Work with application teams and data owners to identify which workloads are most critical and should be migrated first. This way, you can:
- Migrate only what’s necessary in the initial phase, saving on cloud storage and transfer fees.
- Move high-priority, revenue-generating applications and data first, while leaving less critical data for later migrations.
- Choose the best cloud storage tiers for different types of data (e.g., high-performance storage for mission-critical data, and low-cost storage for archival data).
By focusing on the data that matters most, businesses can ensure they’re not paying for unnecessary storage or network usage.
Reducing Risk: Identify, Classify, and Remediate PII Before Migration
One of the greatest risks of Lift and Shift migrations is the potential exposure of sensitive data, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), in a cloud environment. Moving data without proper classification and remediation can lead to significant security, compliance, and legal issues.
To mitigate risk before migration, businesses should:
- Identify Sensitive Data: Use data discovery tools to scan for PII and other sensitive data before migration. This helps ensure compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.
- Classify and Prioritize: Once sensitive data is identified, classify it according to its risk level. Sensitive data should be handled with more stringent security protocols, such as encryption and masking, both in transit and at rest.
- Remediate Risks: Remediate any security vulnerabilities or compliance issues before migration. This could include applying encryption, anonymization, or removing unnecessary PII before migrating it to the cloud.
By identifying and securing sensitive data early, you reduce the risk of non-compliance and prevent costly data breaches down the line.
A Smarter, More Efficient Migration Strategy
Rather than relying on an outdated Lift and Shift approach, businesses should adopt a more holistic, intelligent data migration strategy that includes:
- Data Optimization: Clean up and optimize data before migration to reduce storage needs and improve migration efficiency.
- Cloud-Native Benefits: Tailor your migration to leverage cloud-native technologies for better performance and cost-efficiency.
- Risk Mitigation: Proactively identify and secure sensitive data to reduce the risk of compliance violations and data breaches.
By ditching the Lift and Shift migration approach and adopting smarter, more strategic methods, businesses can accelerate their cloud adoption while saving costs and reducing risks. Careful planning, data cleanup, and prioritization will ensure your cloud journey is smooth, secure, and cost-effective. Want to strategize and perform a data migration? Congruity360 can help. Get in touch with our team today to plan your data migration journey.
For more information on how we approach data migrations, learn about our Intelligent Migration method.
Supporting Resources
- Gartner: “Avoiding the Lift-and-Shift Trap: How to Migrate to the Cloud the Right Way” – Gartner highlights the inefficiencies and risks associated with the Lift and Shift method, emphasizing the importance of data optimization and strategic prioritization.
- Forbes: “Why Lift-and-Shift Cloud Migration Is Costing You More Than You Think” – Forbes discusses the hidden costs of Lift and Shift migrations and suggests alternatives that better align with cloud-native capabilities and cost-efficiency.
- McKinsey & Company: “Unlocking the Cloud: How to Migrate and Optimize for Business Value” – McKinsey outlines the need for a more tailored, thoughtful approach to cloud migration that goes beyond simply lifting and shifting.
