Lift and Shift: A Holistic Approach to Application Modernization

Modernizing your monolithic application can transform your business’s IT landscape, tapping into agility, efficiency, and cost optimization.

But how do you modernize your application?

Re-architect, replatform, migrate, or custom-build – there are multiple approaches to application modernization!

One of the easiest, quickest, and most cost-effective ways to modernize your application is to migrate your existing workload “as is” to the cloud. This is known as the lift and shift.

In this blog post, we’ll look closely at the lift and shift approach and its role in your application modernization journey.

Lift and shift is a way of migrating apps along with its associated data to a trusted and scalable infrastructure without changing the architecture.

For instance, Allscripts, a leading healthcare software provider, used the lift and shift method to migrate dozens of applications and over 1,000 virtual machines (Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux stacks) to Microsoft Azure in just three weeks. All of which resulted in up to 82 percent license‑cost savings via Azure Hybrid Benefit, enterprise‑grade backups and disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery, and a scalable foundation for rapid PaaS‑based innovation.

By transitioning to a highly adaptable cloud architecture, the lift and shift method paves the way for digital transformation. It brings multiple benefits to a business, like lower optimization costs, better flexibility, enhanced speed, innovation, and resilience.

Security is a prime concern for businesses as its consequences are severe and far-reaching. Companies that fall victim to a cyberattack may lose a fortune in revenue and experience permanent damage to their brand reputation.

Companies can bolster cybersecurity by relocating from on-premise network solutions to cloud-based environments. In addition, they can use multifactor authentication and leading-edge cybersecurity measures to safeguard existing infrastructure.

Ultimately, this will protect business continuity and reduce the risk of cyberattacks.

Lift and shift migration model rehosts an application to the cloud with no substantial modifications. That means, enterprises can avoid the costs associated with app re-architecting and business process modifications.

Further, the management and monitoring interfaces also remain unchanged.

Migrating applications, operating systems, and data sources to a new environment is highly time-consuming and labor-intensive. Plus, if the project takes a long time, the company needs numerous resources, which means increased on-premise infrastructure costs.

Lift and shift reduces the need to modify code or architecture. It allows enterprises to migrate databases without requiring a large team. Further, it keeps the on-premises applications running during the migration. This minimizes downtime, and users have consistent application experience.

Lift and shift helps enterprises use the increased resources at their disposal to maximize the ROI of IT systems.

Furthermore, enterprise applications can utilize additional resources during peak usage hours and scale down at other times. Thus, there is no need for enterprises to invest in expensive on-premises applications. Instead, they can modify their computing capacity by leveraging the standard pay-per-use cloud storage model.

Despite its remarkable benefits, lift and shift is not free from obstacles. Its scope is limited compared to actual cloud-native apps. Such apps may improve in the cloud, but they won’t ever reach their full potential.

Here are the challenges of lift and shift:

The applications designed in an on-premise climate may have weak access rights. So when enterprises “lift and shift” mission-critical applications to the cloud, those rights also get migrated. Moreover, the cloud has a complex and shared model, and these weak rights may expose vulnerabilities. Azure services such as Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Azure Key Vault, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud help you enforce least‑privilege policies, protect cryptographic assets, and continuously monitor your cloud posture.

Legacy apps are mostly hosted over on-premises infrastructure. Therefore, they could perform less effectively even after migrating to the cloud. To tackle these performance hurdles, Azure offers services like Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), and Azure SQL Database, which provide scalability, fast content delivery, and high-performance database capabilities.

While simple applications may adapt seamlessly, complex legacy systems often require post-migration fine-tuning to fully capitalize on Azure’s elastic infrastructure.

Migrating to the cloud mainly entails switching from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operating expenditure (OpEx). However, lift-and-shift migrations of resource-intensive applications can still lead to high ongoing costs–especially if the workloads aren’t optimized post-migration and don’t benefit from cloud-native efficiencies.

Azure Cost Management and Billing helps track, analyze, and optimize cloud spending through detailed reports and usage insights. Azure Budgets enables teams to set spending thresholds and receive alerts when limits are approached or exceeded. For long-term cost savings, Azure offers Savings Plans for Compute and Azure Reservations, which allow businesses to commit to consistent usage patterns in exchange for discounted rates.

Basically, the lift and shift approach will replicate your current infrastructure, servers, and data to the cloud. Successful cloud migrations avoid these pitfalls by working through three key migration areas:

This is the initial phase of the lift and shift process. Here, your cloud vendor analyzes your current system and processes to determine if lift-and-shift migration is possible. After this, they conduct automated discovery to gain a complete picture of the entire IT landscape.

The cloud vendors, will then, identify the elements of your existing system, identify gaps, and determine the good and bad areas. Finally, offer possible solutions to improve those bad areas and fill the gaps in the modernization process.

After the system assessment, the next phase is planning the migration. So, start with defining a clear business case, the technical side of the job, and the governance of such a process.

Then, incorporate a security assessment of the new system.

Last but not least, plan the training and education of your ops teams. Tools like Azure Migrate streamline this phase by offering dependency visualization and cost estimation for Azure resources.

This is where the migration process starts!

For migration, first, prepare your cloud environment, set up the accounts, and add users. Then, validate the work done in each phase.

Next, prepare your current system for migration. This usually includes installing software agents on servers and connecting them with a dedicated control center.

For server rehosting with minimal downtime, use Azure Migrate: Server Migration to automate the replication of physical servers, VMware VMs, or Hyper-V VMs to Azure. This tool, integrated with Azure Site Recovery, ensures near-zero downtime by continuously syncing data until the final cutover. Azure Migrate also provides comprehensive support for migrating databases, apps, and virtual desktops.

Choosing the right migration strategy depends on factors like risk, compatibility, performance, scalability, and long-term cost-efficiency. It’s essential to evaluate all application components and dependencies before deciding on the approach.

Instead of migrating an existing app, some businesses opt to replace it entirely with a SaaS solution (e.g., replacing a custom HR system with Workday). It’s ideal when there’s a mature SaaS solution available that meets your business needs. This strategy offers low operational overhead, quick implementation, and minimal maintenance.

By contrast, lift and shift retains the existing app as-is, preserving full control and custom functionality, but may not offer all the long-term benefits of SaaS.

Replatforming involves making minimal code changes and moving your application to a new runtime platform, optimizing it for the cloud environment without completely rebuilding it. It can help take advantage of PaaS offerings like Azure App Service or Azure SQL Database. This requires more effort than lift and shift but provides better scalability, availability, and integrated cloud services.

Lift and shift, on the other hand, migrates workloads without altering the codebase or architecture. It’s best suited when you want speed over optimization, or when modernization can wait.

Refactoring rewrites parts or all of the application to be cloud-native– often using microservices, modern languages/tools, APIs, and containerization. This unlocks the full benefits of the cloud but requires significant time and resources.

Lift and shift avoids this complexity by rehosting the existing application in the cloud infrastructure, making it ideal for legacy systems where refactoring is too costly or impractical.

Lift and shift works best when speed and simplicity outweigh the need for deep cloud optimization. Here are some situations where this strategy makes the most sense:

If your on-prem infrastructure is nearing end-of-life or you’re under pressure to vacate a data center—due to lease expiration, compliance needs, or hardware refresh cycles—lift and shift offers a quick and low-risk migration path.

Instead of investing in new hardware or risking downtime, you can rehost critical workloads with minimal changes. For example, Netflix used this approach to escape physical infrastructure failures in 2008, before gradually modernizing its architecture.

Tools like Azure Migrate can help you assess existing workloads and plan rehosting strategies efficiently.

Organizations that aren’t ready for full cloud-native transformation can still reduce CapEx and operational overhead by migrating to IaaS. This approach helps you:

• Retire legacy infrastructure
• Avoid renewing expensive licenses
• Defer complex re-architecting efforts
  

While it may not deliver optimal cloud cost savings upfront, services like Azure Cost Management and Azure Reservations can help identify post-migration savings opportunities.

If your team lacks deep cloud-native or DevOps skills, lift and shift is a low-barrier path to cloud adoption. It avoids the steep learning curve of containerization or serverless architectures.

Using Azure Automanage, teams can streamline operations post-migration, automate patching and compliance, and gradually upskill while their workloads remain stable in the cloud.

This approach enables organizations to meet immediate capacity needs while buying time to develop internal capabilities for future modernization.

Tightly coupled applications, lack of documentation, or critical systems with high rewrite risk are poor candidates for refactoring.

Lift and shift allows you to preserve business continuity by migrating such applications as-is. Once stabilized in the cloud, you can use tools like Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment to analyze dependencies and plan gradual optimization or replatforming.

To maximize the benefits of modernizing legacy applications via lift and shift, leverage the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, which provides comprehensive guidance for designing reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-optimized workloads in the cloud. This helps ensure that your infrastructure and applications are aligned with cloud-native best practices.

Monitor and optimize resources throughout modernization. Use Azure Monitor for real-time insights into infrastructure and application health–identifying bottlenecks like underutilized VMs or inefficient queries and optimizing resource allocation. Pair it with Azure Advisor for proactive recommendations to enhance security, reduce costs (e.g., resizing overprovisioned VMs), and improve system performance.

Automate resource provisioning to ensure consistency and scalability. With Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, you can define infrastructure as code (IaC), automating the deployment and configuration of Azure resources like virtual networks, storage, and virtual machines. This eliminates manual errors and accelerates environment reproducibility.

A thoughtful lift-and-shift approach, supported by the right Azure services, can enhance operational efficiency while keeping costs in check. But modernization isn’t just a technical task—it also involves aligning cloud efforts with business goals, assessing legacy complexity, and choosing the right delivery model.

Simform brings the expertise to simplify and accelerate your modernization journey. From application re-assessment and rehosting to re-architecture and custom development, our team ensures smooth migrations with minimal disruption. Let’s discuss how we can make your cloud transformation faster and more cost-effective.