The reasons for expediating cloud migration plans can vary, from business continuity in order to sustain work-at-home employees, the need for greater application uptime and scalability, enhanced disaster recovery, or something else. Regardless of the motivation, to ensure long-term success it’s important to have a distinct approach to cloud migration before diving in. From lift and shift to replatforming or refactoring, there is no single path to success. And, indeed, a hybrid approach is often the ideal answer.

What are the Options?

While there are multiple migration approaches, the three most common are:

Which Migration Path is Best?

Start by examining your IT systems to determine which infrastructure and workloads are of minimal business value and should be retired, and which are of high business value and should move to the cloud. Ask, is the application of strategic benefit to the business? Does it contribute to revenue or is it an application necessary for the business? If the former, it should be invested in, and if the latter, it should be sustained at the lowest possible TCO. This distinction is important, as the resources required for cloud services or cloud-ready migrations are better invested in strategic applications.

Applications with low business value benefit most from infrastructure automation that allows you to reinstall the app in the cloud on new virtual machines (VMs), giving you the opportunity to clear technical debt while adding new best practices like security.

Conversely, applications with high business value require a cost-benefit analysis. Examine the cost for development resources and business interruptions that may occur during a significant rewrite. Carefully compute the business benefits of a cloud-native migration; if the benefits outweigh the cost, and the direction is achievable within the constraints, this is the right approach. Note that due to resource constraints, this approach is usually only taken for a small fraction of applications. 

If this approach is not feasible, a cloud-services ready approach is a right choice. Without requiring major code changes, this approach can provide significant cloud benefits like auto-scaling, self-healing, containers, and more. The answers to these questions will illuminate the best path for your cloud migration.

To highlight with an example, an enterprise media company conducted a migration analysis and found that about 50% of its applications should be re-hosted. Ten percent were to be retired or retained on-premises, and the remaining 40% were flagged for replatforming/refactoring given their business-critical nature. Using this strategy, the firm migrated its assets, maximizing cloud benefits for applications that would gain the most while not spending resources on applications that would benefit minimally.

Cloud migration is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. Maximize your cloud computing benefits by mapping your organizational goals and the workloads that support them to those cloud features that will help further those goals. Learn more about conducting a thorough assessment, and building a solid migration plan tailored to your business objectives.

Download the Guide: Five Strategies for Large Scale Cloud Migration

This story, "Key Questions to Optimize Your Cloud Migration Path" was originally published by CIO.