Why Lift and Shift Alone Fails and What Enterprises Can Do Instead

Think cloud migration is a slam dunk? Think again. nearly 50% of cloud projects either fail or stall mid-way. In fact, Gartner once reported a staggering 83% of data migrations flop outright, with over half blowing past their budgets.

These eye-opening stats have CIOs swapping war stories: “We moved everything to the cloud, yet nothing improved. Costs went up, performance stayed flat.” It turns out the old “lift-and-shift”, simply hoisting apps to the cloud without changes, often just relocates your problems.

As one frustrated IT leader quipped, “All we did was lift our mess and shift it elsewhere.” In this post, we’ll chat peer-to-peer about why that happens and explore smarter strategies to actually make cloud worth it.

Problems with Lift-and-Shift

On paper, “lift-and-shift” (rehosting) sounds painless: no code changes, quick migration, minimal upfront cost. But reality can bite. Here are the common pitfalls when enterprises forklift legacy systems into the cloud without retooling:

Transferred Inefficiencies & Cost Surprises:

If your app was inefficient on-prem, it’ll be inefficient in the cloud, only now you get a bill for it. One financial firm learned this the hard way: six months post-move, their cloud costs ran ~40% higher than projected because they lifted servers “as-is” (running 24/7, over-provisioned for peak load, with chatty data transfers).

Industry data backs this up. Keeping an application unchanged after migration can inflate cloud costs by around 15% in the long run.

Simply put, migrating without optimizing is like moving into a new house and leaving all the lights on – you shouldn’t be shocked when the utility bill soars.

Performance Stalls:

Lifting a poorly-architected application to cloud infrastructure won’t magically make it run faster. One company migrated a monolithic web app expecting the cloud’s “elastic” resources to fix its slowness. The result? The site kept crashing under load, because the underlying design still couldn’t scale to handle bursts.

The cloud can only do so much if your software isn’t built to utilize it. As a candid post-mortem noted, existing issues are rarely solved by migration alone and can even worsen in a new environment.

Security and Compliance Gaps:

Lifting workloads “as is” means you might also be porting over outdated security configurations. Cloud environments have shared responsibility models and new threat vectors. A regional healthcare provider learned this when a rushed lift-and-shift led to a security breach within three months, they’d copied their system to cloud without updating access controls or monitoring, effectively dropping the defenses they had on-prem.

Compliance requirements don’t automatically carry over either. Without re-assessing security in the migration, you risk exposing data and violating regulations – a nightmare scenario for CIOs in regulated industries.

Unmet Expectations & Hidden Dependencies:

Many CIOs expect instant wins. Cost savings, better performance, from a quick rehost. The reality often falls short. There’s frequently a gap between expectations and what lift-and-shift can deliver.

Why? Organizations tend to underestimate application complexity. Interconnected services and databases that worked fine together on-prem can break or slow down once split across cloud services. Companies often discover overlooked dependencies only after migrating, causing unexpected outages or delays.

The “simple move” reveals tangled integrations and spaghetti architectures that weren’t documented. Inadequate upfront assessment is a chief culprit here, without a deep dive, you end up lifting stuff you shouldn’t, or in the wrong order, and it backfires.

Operational and Skill Gaps:

Finally, “shifted” systems demand new ways of operating. Cloud platforms require different tooling, cost management, and DevOps practices. If your team isn’t prepared, a lift-and-shift dumps them into unfamiliar territory. Many firms struggle with a cloud skills shortage, leading to misconfigured systems and project stalls.

It’s telling that in one survey 54% of organizations admitted lacking in-house cloud skills, hampering their migrations. Plus, traditional IT processes often don’t translate well to cloud. Not updating your ops model means you might launch cloud workloads before your people and processes are ready to manage them.

The outcome is chaos: budget overruns, security incidents, teams in firefighting mode. Lift-and-shift without operational re-think is a recipe for cloud disappointment.

What Enterprises Should Do Instead

So if a brute-force lift-and-shift isn’t the silver bullet, what’s the better path? From hard lessons in the field, successful enterprises follow a more nuanced game plan. Here are strategies CIOs and IT leaders can use to maximize cloud gains and minimize regrets:

Assess and Plan Before You Move:

Cloud migration is 90% preparation, 10% execution. Start with a thorough application portfolio assessment. Identify what you have, how everything connects, and each system’s cloud suitability.

Map dependencies and baseline performance/cost profiles. This upfront diligence prevents nasty surprises (like discovering a critical app can’t function in cloud due to a hard-coded latency assumption). Equally important, build a clear business case for each workload. Ask “Why are we moving this? What’s the desired outcome?”

Don’t be that company. Define success metrics (cost, speed, resilience improvements, etc.) at the outset. A well-defined plan is your insurance against cloud chaos.

Adopt a “Phased and Prioritized” Migration:

You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) migrate everything at once. Triage your applications – some are easy wins, others are high-risk beasts. Prioritize low-complexity, low-risk workloads for initial migrations to get quick wins and build team experience. This phased approach means you start small, learn, and then tackle bigger challenges.

Many cloud-savvy CIOs choose a pilot project or two (say, a non-critical internal app) to refine their approach before moving mission-critical systems. Also consider business timing – e.g. migrate accounting systems after year-end close, not right before.

Phasing the migration avoids a “big bang” cutover that could paralyze the business if things go wrong. It also gives IT teams a chance to iron out kinks, develop cloud expertise, and prove value incrementally.

Optimize During Migration (Don’t Just Rehost and Forget):

The latest thinking encourages “lift-and-optimize” over pure lift-and-shift. This means making targeted improvements as you migrate, instead of a wholesale refactor (which can be too slow), but also not a blind copy-paste.

For example, you might switch to a cloud-native database service in place of a self-managed one, or right-size server instances for the new environment. Gartner analysts now make the case that a “revise and optimize” style migration is a better choice than straight rehosting in most cases.

The idea is to avoid carrying over all your technical debt. Even small tweaks, like updating an app to use auto-scaling, or breaking one part into a managed service – can yield big payoffs in cost or reliability.

You don’t have to rewrite everything on Day 1, but do seize “low-hanging fruit” improvements during migration. Think of it as “lift, tinker, and shift”. This sets you up to actually leverage cloud capabilities, rather than treating the cloud like just another rental data center.

Embrace Cloud-Native and Refactor Strategically:

Over the long term, the real gains come from modernizing applications to be cloud-native. This might mean refactoring monoliths into microservices, containerizing workloads, or adopting serverless functions where appropriate. The key is to focus refactoring where it drives business value, not just for tech novelty.

For core systems that differentiate your business, say a customer-facing platform needing rapid innovation. A full re-architecting might be worth it to achieve scalability and agility. On the other hand, if an app is working fine and adds little competitive value, you might leave it as is (retain on-prem for now) or eventually replace it with SaaS, rather than invest in refactoring.

Don’t try to cloud-optimize every single system at once; pick your battles based on ROI. Many enterprises use a bimodal approach: quickly rehost what they must, but concurrently invest in refactoring the high-impact applications.

It’s no coincidence that digital leaders (think fintechs, hyper-scalers) pour effort into cloud-native redesign of systems that directly affect customer experience, while taking a lighter touch on back-office or legacy apps. Modernize where it matters.

Build Cloud Skills and Operations Excellence:

One cannot overstate this – people and process make or break cloud success. Investing in your team’s cloud expertise is an actionable must-do, not a nice-to-have. Form a Cloud Center of Excellence or similar cross-functional team to accumulate know-how and set best practices. Provide training, hire experienced cloud architects, or bring in partners to mentor your staff.

Alongside skills, update your IT processes for the cloud era. This includes implementing FinOps (cloud cost management disciplines) to avoid surprise bills, and DevOps practices to manage infrastructure as code and automate deployments. Strong governance is essential: set up guardrails, monitoring, and security policies from day one.

The goal is to transition from the old world of fixed hardware and manual ops to a cloud-operating model with continuous optimization. Organizations that succeed treat cloud adoption as a transformational change, not just a tech install.

They realign roles (e.g. operations teams evolve into SREs or cloud engineers), redefine KPIs (e.g. measure service availability and cost per use), and foster a culture of accountability for cloud usage. By upskilling people and refining processes, you ensure your shiny new cloud infrastructure isn’t undermined by outdated ways of working.

Align Cloud Moves to Business Goals:

Last but definitely not least, always tie your migration approach to business outcomes. Cloud shouldn’t be adopted for its own sake or because of “executive FOMO.” Avoid random lift-and-shifts driven by vague directives like “cloud-first at all costs.” Instead, be cloud-smart: move what makes sense, when it makes sense.

If a workload has unpredictable spikes that hurt customer experience, prioritize it for cloud scalability. If another system is stable, costly to rewrite, and not customer-impacting, you might keep it on-prem a bit longer (or shift it with minimal changes just to retire a data center).

By clearly articulating how each migration supports a business objective, whether it’s faster time to market, entering a new region without building data centers, or improving resiliency – you get buy-in from the C-suite and set proper success criteria. As Gartner advises, tie cloud plans to top-line and bottom-line goals, and educate executives about the risks of oversimplified moves (like lifting the wrong workloads).

When tech decisions are guided by business value, you avoid the trap of “cloud for cloud’s sake” and instead execute a strategy that stakeholders understand and support.

Summary Decision Framework:

Every enterprise portfolio is unique, but you can apply a general decision framework when crafting your cloud migration game plan. Here’s a simple way to break it down, think of plotting each application on two axes: Business Value and Transformation Effort. Then consider these guidelines (your “decision matrix”) for what to do:

High Business Value, High Complexity:

These are critical apps that justify significant effort because they drive revenue or competitive advantage, but they may be tightly-coupled, old, or otherwise hard to migrate. Recommended approach: Modernize deliberately.

Consider refactoring or re-architecting these systems to truly leverage cloud scalability and resilience. You might migrate them in stages (e.g. break into microservices gradually) or use a hybrid approach (keep some components on-prem until cloud replacements are ready).

The key is to invest in doing it right, the payoff (e.g. better customer experience, faster innovation) will be worth it. Ensure strong executive support and a clear business case here, since these projects can be lengthy. This is where you do the “hard things first” if they’re strategic, as Capital One did with customer-facing apps.

High Business Value, Low Complexity:

These are your “low-hanging fruit” with big upside, important apps that aren’t too difficult to migrate or have readily available cloud alternatives. Recommended approach: Migrate and optimize early. You can often replatform or slightly refactor these during the move for quick wins.

For example, a simple web service that is crucial for your operations might be moved to cloud and switched to use a managed database or caching service for instant performance gains. Since these workloads matter to the business, you want them in the cloud sooner to start reaping benefits like better uptime or global reach. Just be careful to do some light optimization (the “tinker” in lift-and-tinker) so you’re not carrying over inefficiencies. A well-executed quick win here not only delivers value but also builds confidence in your cloud program.

Low Business Value, High Complexity:

These are the troublemakers, systems that are difficult/expensive to modernize but don’t offer much strategic benefit. Perhaps an old ERP module or a dormant application that only a few departments use.

Recommended approach: Re-evaluate necessity. In many cases, it’s best to retain or retire these rather than migrating them blindly. As AWS advisors note, often 10-20% of an enterprise portfolio can simply be turned off or left as-is because it’s not worth the effort.

If the app must remain for some reason (e.g. compliance retention), you could consider “containment” strategies: keep it on-prem for now, or do a minimal lift-and-shift to remove a data center dependency, but don’t spend big on it. Another option is repurchasing – if there’s a SaaS or COTS solution that covers the functionality, weigh replacing the custom system altogether.

The main point: be very selective with high-complexity, low-value workloads; migrating them can consume resources better spent elsewhere.

Low Business Value, Low Complexity:

These are relatively easy to move and also not terribly important applications. Recommended approach: Simplify and consolidate. Since they’re low value, you don’t want to over-invest time or money. A straight lift-and-shift might be fine here if it helps you close an old data center or eliminate hardware, but you should also consider if the app is even needed or if two such apps can be consolidated.

Sometimes organizations realize a low-value app can be retired or merged into another system during migration planning (another source of savings). If you do migrate it, keep it lightweight – maybe use basic rehosting or containerization to pack multiple such apps efficiently in the cloud.

The goal is to reduce maintenance overhead. These apps are good training ground for junior cloud team members too, since mistakes are lower stakes. Just remember, even if it’s a simple lift, apply basic cloud hygiene (security, backups, etc.) so you don’t create a vulnerability out of negligence.

Using this matrix-style thinking ensures you’re aligning effort with reward. It echoes the classic “6 Rs” of cloud migration (Retain, Retire, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase) – but framed in a business-centric way.

For each application, ask: what is the smart move here, and why? Maybe it’s rehost now and refactor later (common for medium-value legacy systems), or skip rehosting entirely and go straight to SaaS (common for commodity tools like CRM/HR systems via Salesforce or Workday).

The right answer will vary, but the wrong approach is treating everything the same. By making nuanced decisions, you avoid the one-size-fits-all lift-and-shift trap.

Final Takeaway:

Lifting and shifting alone is not a cloud strategy, it’s a starting move at best, and a costly detour at worst. The allure of a quick lift-off to cloud paradise is understandable, but as we’ve seen, reality often has other plans. The good news is you’re not flying blind. By learning from those bruises and triumphs we discussed, you can plot a smarter course.

Need help avoiding cloud migration pitfalls? At Kumaran Systems, we don’t just move workloads, we modernize them with strategy, speed, and long-term value in mind. Let’s talk.