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How can lift-and-shift migration transform legacy systems?Legacy systems are the backbone of business infrastructure, as most of the critical applications and workloads operate on them. But as this hardware ages, it causes significant risks like hardware failure, unplanned downtime, increasing maintenance costs, security vulnerabilities, compatibility challenges, and limited scalability. Replacing the entire legacy infrastructure may not be the right strategy as it's time-consuming and expensive. With a lift-and-shift migration strategy, businesses can seamlessly move applications to modern infrastructure or cloud environments without code changes.
Stromasys brings Charon emulation solutions that mimic the behavior of legacy hardware on a modern platform or the cloud and uses a lift-and-shift migration approach to move the legacy applications. This legacy system modernization strategy minimizes disruption, reduces costs, and extends application lifecycles while maintaining business continuity. This strategy helps businesses preserve essential applications while eliminating legacy hardware dependencies and minimizing costs without any risky migration or rewrites.
ArticlesMany organizations still depend on legacy systems for critical operations. In most cases, these applications perform business-critical workloads and replacing them entirely often isn’t viable.
The problem, however, lies within the hardware. Aging hardware becomes very unreliable, difficult to maintain, and expensive to repair.
What’s the best way forward? Replacing legacy hardware outright is costly, and re-architecting applications from scratch can disrupt operations.
Thus, for many companies, the answer is the lift-and-shift migration strategy (also known as rehosting).
This process enables businesses to move their business applications from on-premises hardware onto modern infrastructure, either on-premises or in the cloud, without rewriting the application code.
Modernize Your Legacy Environment Without Replacing the Entire Infrastructure with Stromasys Charon Solution.
Lift-and-shift involves migrating a legacy application or workload as it is, maintaining its embedded architecture while simply relocating it. No redesigning. No re-architecting. No extensive reworking.
The lift-and-shift migration acts as a bridge to legacy application modernization:
Imagine picking up an application, “lifting” it from on-premise servers, then “shifting” it into modern hardware or the cloud environment. This minimal-change method is a fast, simple and less labor-intensive approach to avoid expensive and risky application migration projects.
The following illustration of Lift-and-Shift migration by Stromasys will give you more clarity about this process:
This approach, when guided by an expert team, is key to saving both time and costs for businesses. It is a guiding light that allows them access to advanced resources without overhauling their entire IT ecosystem.
Not every system is appropriate for lift-and-shifting. But how can you carefully assess whether lift-and-shift migration is right for you and whether this is the right time to go for lift and shift?
In this scenario, your critical applications that are essential for your business operations are facing challenges due to aging hardware. This may be because your legacy servers are nearing failure, but rearchitecting your application isn’t possible yet, or the applications are so important to your business that you don’t want to replace or modify them. In such cases, the lift-and-shift migration approach can help you safely transition operations to modern hardware or the cloud while you prepare long-term plans.
Rising infrastructure and maintenance costs might be eating into your IT budget. Lift-and-shift, especially to the cloud (because of the usage-based model), can reduce these capital expenditures, allowing you to deploy your IT budget on other priority projects.
If your business is under pressure to exit an on-premise data center (e.g., due to undeniable legacy risks, cost-saving initiatives, etc.) quickly, lift-and-shift is ideally suited as it doesn’t involve any redesigning.
A complete system overhaul is risky. Downtime and system failures can occur during legacy modernization, potentially impacting business operations and productivity. The process is also time-consuming, and user retraining can make it even lengthier. All of these factors can lead to business disruptions. So, if business continuity is non-negotiable, lift and shift migration is an ideal choice.
Enterprises lacking budget and expertise may use lift-and-shift migration as a temporary step. In this situation, lift-and-shift migration buys time so that decision-makers can determine whether they really need a complete migration.
A good strategy involves moving to the cloud. But why do enterprises choose cloud migration for lift-and-shift? It makes perfect business sense. Studies have shown that businesses migrating their legacy infrastructure to the cloud have significantly minimized their annual expenses. Companies moving to the cloud save an average of 30-50% on IT expenditures, largely due to them shifting from capital-intensive (CapEx) hardware investments to a pay-as-you-go operational expense (OpEx) model. Also, migrating the critical application to the cloud offers operational stability, enhanced security, and financial predictability.
Why should you opt for lift-and-shift migration? Migrating to modern hardware or cloud environments offers several advantages over sticking with legacy systems. These include:
Every day, industries like banking, healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, and defense use legacy applications to execute critical workloads. Therefore, there is no need to replace them. In some cases, they are irreplaceable. Usually, it is the hardware that causes all the problems.
Lift-and-shift migration eliminates hardware dependencies without shutting down vital applications. Running these legacy applications on a new, supported infrastructure ensures they remain operational for years to come.
Legacy hardware reliability declines over time. Spare parts become scarce. Skilled engineers are hard to find. Downtime skyrockets. According to Gartner, companies face 87 hours of network downtime yearly at an estimated cost of $42,000 per hour, totaling $3.6M annually.
The Lift-and-Shift migration approach solves all of these operational and financial challenges, eliminating your management headaches. In fact, if you are rehosting on the cloud, you can ensure higher availability and cost-efficient repairs compared to hunting for outdated components.
When you opt for cloud migration in lift-and-shift, you can implement better disaster recovery strategies. Having geographically distributed backups and failover instances minimizes disruption when disaster strikes.
A great example of this is when a top-rated cement manufacturing company, having a single location for production and using entirely on-premise facilities, needed a better DR plan. Using a cloud migration strategy in lift-and-shift helped ensure a sound recovery solution, along with several other perks. The security felt by the company would not have come up with the addition of another location, which would require stretched-out planning and exorbitant spending.
In modern infrastructure, security patches and firmware updates keep older systems safe. In addition, moving to the cloud adds built-in security layers, such as firewalls, access control lists (ACLs), and backups stored geographically.
With these improvements, lift-and-shift addresses legacy hardware’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Modern physical or cloud hardware platforms bring faster processors, better memory architectures, and advanced tools. In turn, this boosts application performance significantly. Even if the emulation process introduces slight overhead, this is often offset by the speed gains from modern systems.
Here’s a real-life example. MediSolution, a Canadian IT company, ran mission-critical applications on legacy Alpha hardware that was difficult to maintain. Through Stromasys’ lift-and-shift emulation, they were able to eliminate hardware challenges as well as improve the performance of their critical systems by 100%.
Lift-and-Shift by Cloud Migration
The cloud is a very popular option for apps, be it for personal or commercial usage. The same applies to lift-and-shift migration. A proper cloud migration strategy for lift-and-shift is necessary for the plan to work well and contribute as expected to your enterprise.
While the process is quite similar for both cloud and non-cloud migrations, the former has certain advantages for certain businesses. If your space and equipment for hardware are limited or capital is finite, you will feel immensely thankful for having the cloud. It is also what the world is moving towards as the future arrives.
After all, O’Reilly reported that 90% of organizations were using the cloud already. The number can only grow now, even with cloud repatriation. Legacy systems will also use the chance to move their software to this source, which can only give them advantages as seen in the story of Orange Business.
| Feature | Lift-and-Shift | Re-Architecting | Rebuilding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Lower initial cost | Moderate | High initial cost |
| Migration Time | Quick | Moderate | Time-intensive |
| Code Modification | Minimal to none | Some | Extensive changes |
| Business Continuity | High (minimal disruption to operations) | Moderate (some downtime during migration or adjustment period) | Low (significant downtime and testing required) |
| User Training | Minimal (existing systems remain largely unchanged) | Moderate (new processes and workflows may require training) | High (entirely new systems require extensive training) |
| Performance Benefits | Leverages new hardware, improved security | Tailored for performance | Maximum performance with custom design |
| Complexity | None | Medium | High |
EIS Wire & Cable, a US-based manufacturer, heavily relied on AlphaServer ES40 hardware. But replacement parts were scarce, and downtime risks rose. The company turned to the lift-and-shift approach using the Charon-AXP emulator to modernize its system.
The process was completed in under 24 hours, transitioning operations seamlessly to a VMware environment. Post-migration, MRP processing times dropped from 15 minutes to less than a minute, allowing employees to focus on business-critical tasks.
Lift-and-shift migration gave EIS Wire & Cable newfound confidence in their system’s reliability while freeing up their budget for legacy hardware maintenance.
Stromasys is a one-of-a-kind emulation solution provider that makes legacy modernization look simple. With over 7000 successful installations, our list of happy customers is endless.
Over the past two decades, Stromasys has been a leader in cross-platform emulation services. Based on the principle of lift-and-shift emulation, we have designed our very own engineered Charon emulation solution.
Whether in the cloud or physically, it emulates SPARC, PA-RISC, VAX, PDP and AlphaServers. In other words, enterprises get the best of both worlds, keeping their legacy applications alive and removing outdated hardware at the same time.
Your legacy application may be functional: your hardware isn’t. Charon lets your team focus on what matters while leaving IT complexity behind.
Lift-and-shift via cloud migration is the process of moving applications, workloads, or infrastructure to a new cloud platform. It involves minimal changes to the existing architecture. This method is quick and cost-effective for organizations, allowing them to migrate without redesigning their systems.
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