Hi LeanIX Community!

Hope everyone is doing well! Cloud Migration Assessment is essential in the ever-changing landscapes to meet the business’s evolution and technology change. Deploying the latest versions of critical applications according to established best practices improves business performance, ensures IT security, and enables organizational agility while also enabling cost optimization and driving efficiency. Migrating applications to the cloud remains a leading innovation and modernization approach worldwide that organizations are facing on a daily basis.

*6R AWS Framework* (can be activated in your workspace today): https://docs-eam.leanix.net/docs/cloud-migration-assessmen

Rehost

Rehosting is commonly referred to as lift and shift. Right now, lift and shift is generally as it sounds —  lifting servers or applications from their current hosting environment, which is generally going to be on-prem —  and shifting them to infrastructure in the public cloud and rehosting. The lift-and-shift strategy is a very common strategy for organizations starting out on their migration journey.

Replatform

The second option is replatforming, and this is where we modify “lift and shift.” Replatforming involves making some optimizations to the application during the migration stage, so that does require some programming input and expertise. For example, you might end up moving from your own relational database system to a turnkey managed RDS on a cloud provider — same underlying tech, different business model with cloud resiliency auto-added.

Repurchase

This is sometimes referred to as “drop and shop,” as it refers to a decision to move to another product. This may mean ending existing licensing and repurposing services on new platforms or services. Examples you may have are a CRM system or an industry-specific application not designed to run on cloud infrastructures. This is often not necessarily a custom application, but it can be one that doesn’t have modern application code, or it could be a situation where it’s not possible to transport the code from one provider to another. The “repurpose” strategy is often applied when using a proprietary database platform or a proprietary product and moving to something else.

Refactor

The fourth R is refactoring, which is basically re-architecting. This is usually driven by a strong desire to improve a service or application. Drivers for this might be difficulty making improvements to the current environment, or a requirement to improve availability and reliability of the application immediately for an anticipated burst of traffic and activity. 

The solution is to refactor this application so that it can handle that type of burst activity. If it’s not a mission-critical service, then it may be possible to re-architect during the migration stage (i.e., refactoring is feasible during the first stage of a migration if you do not have a time constraint). Otherwise, it’s most likely better to complete this in a later phase of the project. This is just something to keep in mind, because one of the key problems with refactoring is that it’s going to take a little bit of time and expertise.

Retain

The fifth strategy is to retain. You may want to retain portions of your IT portfolio because there are some applications that you’re not ready to migrate and you feel more comfortable keeping them on-premises, or you may need to do so for compliance reasons. With this use case, it may make sense to retain aspects of your IT services in the current environment and implement a hybrid or part migration strategy. 

Retire

This brings us to our last strategy, which is to retire services. This strategy involves identifying assets and services that can be turned off, so the business can focus on services that are widely used and of immediate value. 

Benefits of utilizing a framework:

• Visibility

• Effective Data Points for Decision Making

• Documentation of the past state, as-is state, and helps plan for the future state 

Please share your experiences! Have you already integrated the 6R Framework into LeanIX or have you developed a custom framework for tracking cloud migration processes? Any insight you provide can help others make better decisions on their LeanIX journey.

As always, LeanIX is here to support your journey and provide guidance every step of the way!

Thanks,

Niral Mehta