Every business is dependent on IT services in one way or another for carry out its functioning efficiently. In this competitive global business world, any business that limits itself to on-premises servers will be giving a competitive edge to its rivals in the long run. This is why cloud migration has become the name of the game. Cloud migration involves transferring data, infrastructure and applications from one’s on-premises system to a virtual pool that consists of shared, on-demand resources, which provide scalable storage, network services and compute. When a business migrates to the cloud, it does away with the factors that had been preventing it from benefitting from the scalability, speed and savings that a cloud is capable of delivering. It is best for any business to opt for cloud migration and discontinue investing in infrastructure that isn’t able to effectively cater to the rapidly evolving technological developments. Cloud migration enables a business to reap the benefits of not only cost savings along with scalability but also of responding more swiftly to market changes.

To digress, cloud technology is so efficient that it is used by web hosting companies as well for the purpose of hosting websites. The most efficient web hosting companies are usually referred to as the “Top Cloud Hosting Company”, the “Best Linux Hosting Company”, the “Best Windows Hosting Company” etc.

While planning cloud migration, it becomes essential for a business to take stock of its business model along with its goals, its infrastructure and applications, and then determine accordingly the applications that need to be migrated and the way to attain that goal.

What are the Five Rs of Cloud Migration?

The success of cloud migration depends on proper planning and strategizing. In the context of cloud migration, there are five Rs, which refer to the various options that can be used for cloud migration. Rehost, refactor, revise, rebuild and replace collectively form the five Rs of cloud migration. Each of these five Rs is described below in detail.

• Rehosting– Rehosting, which is also referred to as lift and shift, involves transferring one’s existing virtual and physical servers to a solution that is based on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Its main benefit is that it makes it possible to migrate systems swiftly, without the need for any modification in the architecture. The businesses that are new to cloud usually opt for rehosting. In the process of rehosting the cloud acts as another data center. Hence, one isn’t able to benefit fully from the available cloud services. Rehosting offers an easy way for cloud migration but its drawback is that it is neither a highly available solution nor is it scalable, which means the business has to manage the OS patches on its own.

• Refactoring- Refactoring involves running applications on a set of services that is managed by one’s cloud provider. It is also referred to as PaaS (Platform as a Service). The use of PaaS enables developers to reuse the containers, frameworks and languages in which investment has already been made by them. Such applications that are capable of being refactored can reap the benefits of some cloud-native features, which are delivered by the PaaS infrastructure at reduced costs and enhanced scalability. Its major drawbacks are framework lock-in, transitive risks and missing capabilities.

• Revise- Certain applications need extensive modification for cloud migration. Some of these need an addition of functionalities while others need to be re-architected, prior to being rehosted or refactored and being deployed to the cloud. The amount of changes that are needed are based on an application’s design. Making modifications to a large codebase to render it more cloud-native can be expensive as well as time consuming. Hence, it is not a very convenient option.

• Rebuilding– Rebuilding involves an application’s original coding being discarded and it being re-architected. The application is rebuilt on a PaaS infrastructure. It enables one to reap the benefits of innovative and advanced features that are provided by one’s cloud provider for the purpose of improving one’s application further. The major drawback of rebuilding is vendor lock-in.

• Replacing- In it, the existing application is completely replaced with SaaS (Software as a Service). The main advantage of replacing is that it aids in averting IT development related costs. Its main drawbacks include vendor lock-in, data semantics that are unpredictable and issues in accessing data.