Cloud Migration: Avoid Lift-and-Shift

In our white paper “Data-Driven Government: Secure Data Provision in the Cloud” (German only), we show how the public sector can use digitalization to make data-driven decisions and make processes more efficient. The eCORDA project, which was implemented for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and meets extensive security requirements, is presented as an example of an IT-Grundschutz-compliant cloud environment on AWS. As can be seen in the architecture, we deliberately decided against a lift-and-shift approach - we explain why.

The lift-and-shift approach describes the transfer of existing applications to the cloud without making significant changes to their architecture or functionality. It is often the first choice for companies that want to migrate to the cloud quickly, e.g. to avoid costs for local infrastructure. However, the supposedly temptingly simple method comes with some disadvantages:

• High operating costs: Workloads that are not optimized for the cloud do not make efficient use of the advantages of the cloud, such as scalability and on-demand resource usage, and therefore often drive up operating costs unnecessarily.

• No innovation: Lift-and-shift merely shifts existing problems to a new environment. Legacy systems remain inflexible and the migration does not solve problems such as poor performance, security gaps or maintenance costs.

• Unused cloud benefits: The cloud offers features such as containerization, serverless architectures and managed services - these potentials remain untapped if applications are only transferred 1:1.

• Technical debt: Applications developed for local data centers are often not a good fit for the cloud environment. This leads to technical debt that has to be expensively reduced later on.

Cloud migration should be a strategic modernization - not a simple move

The strategic alternative: refactoring & cloud-native approaches

Instead of transferring existing applications unchanged, it is worth modernizing them for the cloud. Refactoring involves redesigning applications so that they can benefit optimally from cloud technologies. This maximizes efficiency, scalability and innovation through, among other things 

• Optimized costs: The use of cloud-native features such as autoscaling or pay-per-use ensures efficiency and cost savings.
• Better performance: applications can become faster and more reliable thanks to modernized architectures
• Promoting innovation: The integration of cloud services such as AI tools, databases or serverless functions opens up new possibilities.
• Long-term scalability: Cloud-native applications are flexible and can be adapted more easily to new requirements.

A lift-and-shift approach may therefore appear attractive in the short term, but carries the risk of long-term inefficiencies. Strategic modernization through refactoring ensures that companies not only migrate to the cloud, but can also use it as an innovation platform.

► Click here to download the white paper “Data-Driven Government” (German only)