Everyone seems to be moving to the cloud. If your company hasn’t, it can start to feel like the rapture has taken place, and you’re the only ones left behind. Cloud computing has created a workload-location decision process that businesses must confront sooner or later. Gartner recently predicted that by 2025, “80% of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premises data centres”.
However, businesses often find that, in the long run, the strategic value of migrating, such as increased workforce productivity and business agility, often dwarfs the inconveniences. Furthermore, the savings on hard costs such as license renewals, hardware replacements and electricity bills, and soft costs such as manpower, are significant, especially over several years.
A modification to that strategy is called “lift-tinker-and-shift”, also referred to as “replatform”. Here, businesses take advantage of their provider’s native cloud offerings but without making changes to their core architecture. For instance, in order to reduce the amount of time they spend managing database instances, an organization can move to a database-as-a-service offering such as Amazon Relational Database Service .