Top 8 Benefits of Cloud Migration: Challenges & Best Practices

Lift-And-Shift

This is considered the fastest and simplest migration method. It involves moving an application and its associated data exactly as they are, without changing the code or architecture, from the on-premises environment to the cloud.

Best For: Simple applications, systems with short-term retirement plans, or organizations prioritizing a fast, low-cost exit from their data center. It provides quick financial benefits but limited cloud-native optimization.

Re-platforming

This approach is a middle ground where the application’s core architecture remains the same, but you make non-code-changing optimizations to leverage cloud features. Moving an on-premises database server to a managed database service or shifting a server to a containerized service.

Best For: Applications that need better performance or lower operational overhead without the cost and time of a full rewrite. It offers better optimization than pure Lift-and-Shift.

Refactoring

Refactoring is the most extensive and resource-intensive method, involving significant modifications or a complete rewrite of the application code to utilize cloud-native features fully.

Best For: Mission-critical applications where long-term agility, performance, and cost efficiency are paramount. This maximizes the long-term ROI of the cloud but requires the most development effort upfront.

Hybrid Migration

Rather than an approach for a single application, this defines the overall operating environment. A hybrid migration involves moving some workloads to the public cloud while retaining other critical workloads on-premises (or in a private cloud). A dedicated connection or VPN links the two environments.

Best For: Companies with strict regulatory or data residency requirements, or those who need to maintain legacy systems while gradually adopting the cloud for new services. It provides maximum flexibility and risk management.

Retail & eCommerce

Retailers and e-commerce platforms rely heavily on high availability, quick scaling, and personalized user experiences. Cloud migration helps them:

1. Handle traffic spikes effortlessly, especially during festive sales or flash deals.
2. Deliver personalized shopping experiences using cloud-powered analytics and AI.
3. Improve inventory visibility with real-time stock updates across warehouses and stores.
4. Optimize operational costs by paying only for the resources used.

By moving to the cloud, retailers create seamless digital experiences while reducing downtime and ensuring fast, consistent performance across channels.

Healthcare & Life Sciences

Cloud migration is reshaping the healthcare landscape by enabling secure, data-driven care delivery. With the cloud, healthcare organizations can:

1. Store and manage massive patient records without physical infrastructure limitations.
2. Enable telemedicine and remote patient monitoring with reliable real-time access.
3. Ensure regulatory compliance with HIPAA-ready and industry-certified cloud platforms.
4. Accelerate medical research with powerful cloud computing for simulations and data analysis.

This shift helps providers improve patient outcomes while gaining the flexibility to adopt advanced technologies like AI diagnostics and IoT health devices.

FinTech & Banking

Cloud migration enables financial institutions to be more agile. Also, it strengthens compliance and security. The top benefits are:

1. Enhanced data protection and encryption are critical for sensitive financial information.
2. Faster processing of transactions and analytics, supporting real-time decision-making.
3. Efficient scalability during seasonal or market-driven demand fluctuations.
4. Innovation enablement enables companies to deploy new digital banking services and FinTech tools quickly.

Cloud-driven financial ecosystems help banks reduce operational risks, modernize legacy systems, and deliver seamless digital experiences to customers.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers use cloud technology to streamline operations, optimize production, and enable smart automation. Cloud migration supports them through:

1. IoT-enabled production monitoring with real-time machine performance insights.
2. Improved supply chain visibility across factories, suppliers, and logistics partners.
3. Predictive maintenance capabilities reduce downtime and unexpected equipment failures.
4. Centralized data management ensures better collaboration across global manufacturing units.

With cloud integration, manufacturers adopt Industry 4.0 and accelerate digital transformation across the entire production cycle.

EdTech

EdTech platforms thrive on scalability, accessibility, and real-time content delivery—making cloud migration essential. The cloud helps EdTech companies:

1. Support millions of learners simultaneously with elastic infrastructure.
2. Deliver interactive learning experiences with video classes, quizzes, and AI tutors.
3. Enable global content distribution with minimal latency.
4. Enhance data-driven personalization through learning analytics and progress tracking.

Cloud-powered EdTech ensures reliable performance for students and educators worldwide while reducing infrastructure complexity and costs.

Thoroughly Assess Current Infrastructure

This is a discovery phase, which is basically the bedrock of your entire cloud migration strategy. Here, it is important to catalog all the applications, data stores, servers, and network configurations.

Also, you must identify which applications rely on others, as this is critical to prevent downtime later. Another step is to understand the current CPU, memory, and storage utilization.

You also need to determine the suitability of the migration. Here, you can categorize applications based on the 6 Rs of Cloud Migration, i.e., Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire, and Retain. This helps to form the basis of your cloud migration strategy.

Define Migration Goals

Setting clear goals is mandatory when migrating to the cloud. It involves defining financial and technical objectives. Moreover, you need to define success metrics (KPIs) before the migration to measure the project’s success objectively.

Create a Comprehensive Migration Plan

Do not aim to work on everything at once when migrating to the cloud. Pick up a phased approach to minimize potential risks and refine processes with each iteration. It’s necessary to run a pilot program as a proof-of-concept (POC). It helps to validate your architecture, toolset, security controls, and operational procedures in a low-stakes environment.

You can also implement a wave strategy. Here, you need to group apps into “waves” or logical batches based on dependencies, complexity, and business priority. You need to move the lowest-risk applications first, then progress to more complex workloads.

Lastly, establish a Rollback Plan. Before each wave, define the exact conditions that would trigger a rollback to the on-premise environment and the procedures for executing it swiftly.

Ensure Robust Security & Compliance Frameworks

The cloud provider manages cloud security, and you are responsible for protecting security within the cloud. Thus, it operates on a shared responsibility model, which requires a proactive, cloud-native approach.

You need to adopt an Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solution and implement the principle of least privilege. Ensure users and applications only have the minimum permissions necessary to perform their tasks.

Moreover, use encryption for data both at rest (storage) and in transit (network). Define clear data sovereignty and retention policies to meet regulatory requirements like GDPR or HIPAA. Also, use native cloud security tools and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to enforce security policies and configurations, ensuring continuous compliance from day one.

Optimize Post-Migration

After the cloud migration, the first step is to monitor usage to identify overprovisioned instances and downsize them. Commit to reserved instances (RIs) or savings plans for predictable, long-running workloads to secure significant discounts.

You also need to implement automated rules to shut down non-production resources outside business hours to prevent unnecessary spending. Once it is stable, begin refactoring monolithic applications into microservices or leveraging serverless technologies to increase scalability further and reduce operational overhead.