The 7 Rs of Cloud Migration
No matter what your preferred cloud platform of choice is, the Cloud migration strategies typically align with these seven categories known as the “7 Rs,” each offering a different approach to moving workloads to the cloud.
Vivek
10/26/20251 min read
Choosing the Right Strategy
Business goals: Consider existing technology in use (if in place), Align migration with requirements, performance, cost, and agility targets.
Workload complexity: Consider "as a service" model that fits your application: Simpler apps may be rehosted; complex ones might need refactoring. e.g. think, SaaS for email vs IaaS
Time and budget: It's all about time and time is money, Rehosting is faster and cheaper; rebuilding is costly but future-proof.
Compliance and risk: Not all workloads may be good cloud citizens; some workloads may need to stay on-premises (retain).
Each strategy has advantages and also trade-offs in terms of cost, speed, and long-term benefits. Organizations should collaborate internally with the right stakeholders and use a mix of these strategies depending on their portfolio of applications and infrastructure. don't neglect including the security team in your discussions.
The 7 Rs of Cloud Migration
Rehost: Also known as "lift and shift"; move applications without major changes. Various tools are available to assist with this.
Replatform: Make minimal changes to optimize your workloads for the cloud (e.g., switching databases).
Refactor: Redesign parts of the application and approach to better leverage cloud-native features. (e.g. cloud backups)
Rearchitect: Overhaul the architecture to take advantage of cloud scalability and resilience. Depending on your applications criticality, think multi cloud resiliency as well.
Rebuild: Recreate the application from scratch using cloud-native technologies. Allows for the application to leverage modern and feature rich tech, also enabling better compliance and security requirements.
Replace: Swap out the existing system for a SaaS alternative. (e.g. Email services, Cloud file sharing services)
Retire: Decommission obsolete or redundant applications. Costly to maintain, lack of talent to support legacy applications, security risks.
Retain: Not everything may fit in the cloud, Keep certain workloads on-premises due to compliance or technical reasons.
Consider cloud migration like a puzzle and the right piece should go in the right place!