7 R Strategy

Find Your Migration Fit - 7 R Strategy

In your cloud migration journey, one size will never fit all workloads. The 7R strategies offer a practical framework to decide how best to move and transform your legacy applications for the cloud.
This post will help you identify the right migration "fit" for your applications, balancing speed, cost-effectiveness, modernization level, and risk.

1. Rehost ("Lift-and-Shift")

Move your applications as they are to the cloud quickly, with minimal changes and risk.

Rehosting means taking your current applications and servers and moving them to cloud infrastructure without changing code or architecture. It offers a fast migration path and reduces your dependency on physical data centers but may carry over legacy inefficiencies. While you don’t tap full cloud-native benefits yet, this strategy lets you start your cloud journey with less upfront investment and disruption.

Reference Cloud Services

• AWS: AWS Application Migration Service (MGN)

• Azure: Azure Migrate

• GCP: Migrate for Compute Engine

2. Replatform ("Lift-tinker-and-shift")

Make minor optimizations like migrating databases to managed cloud services without major architecture changes.

Replatform involves moving applications to the cloud but with small tweaks to improve efficiency—such as switching on-premise databases to managed services or containerizing apps. This balances the speed of rehosting with some gains in cloud performance and cost savings, preparing your application for future modernization steps.

Reference Cloud Services

• AWS: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS RDS

• Azure: Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database

• GCP: Google App Engine, Google Cloud SQL

3. Repurchase

Replace legacy apps with new SaaS solutions for automatic updates and modern features.

Repurchasing means moving away from owning and managing applications to subscribing to SaaS models, such as replacing on-premise CRMs with Salesforce or migrating email to Google Workspace. This reduces maintenance overhead, ensures always-updated software, and often results in faster adoption of new capabilities.

Reference Cloud Services

• AWS: AWS Marketplace SaaS

• Azure: Azure Marketplace SaaS

• GCP: Google Marketplace SaaS, Google Workspace

4. Refactor ("Rearchitect")

Rebuild applications to fully exploit cloud-native features like serverless, microservices, and event-driven architecture.

Refactoring means redesigning or rewriting core components of your applications to leverage cloud platforms fully. This allows for elastic scalability, cost efficiency, rapid innovation, and resilience that legacy architectures can’t match. Though resource-intensive, refactoring delivers the highest long-term business value and agility.

Reference Cloud Services

• AWS: AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS

• Azure: Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, Azure Service Bus

• GCP:

  • Google Cloud Functions,

  • Firestore,

  • Pub/Sub

5. Relocate

Move entire virtual machine environments to the cloud without changing applications.

Relocate involves shifting whole infrastructure stacks (like VMware environments) into cloud-managed infrastructure without rearchitecting applications. This is ideal for quick migration with minimal disruption but may not fully optimize cloud benefits.

Reference Cloud Services

• AWS: VMware Cloud on AWS

• Azure: Azure VMware Solution

• GCP: Google Cloud VMware Engine

6. Retain

Keep some applications on-premises due to technical, regulatory, or business constraints.

Retention means continuing to operate certain workloads in current environments because they are tightly coupled, end-of-life, or subject to compliance rules. It allows incremental migration and risk mitigation but requires careful ongoing management.

Reference Cloud Services

• AWS: AWS Outposts, AWS Direct Connect

• Azure: Azure Arc

• GCP: Google Anthos

7. Retire

Decommission applications that are no longer useful to reduce costs and complexity.

Retiring unused or redundant applications eliminates maintenance costs, reduces security risk, and simplifies your environment. It’s a crucial step to clean up before or during migration and can unlock budget for innovation projects.

Reference Cloud Services

• Decommissioning is a process; cloud offerings help monitor such workflows, e.g., AWS Config, Azure Advisor, Google Operations Suite for asset tracking and compliance.

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The 7R framework gives you a dynamic roadmap to tailor your cloud migration strategy based on your unique workloads and goals.
Choosing the right "R" accelerates your journey, reduces risk, and maximizes gains from the cloud.

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