Lift-and-shift versus refactor guidance

Overview

Help stakeholders choose between rehost (fast, lower change risk) and refactor/replatform (cost and agility upside, more project risk).

Lift-and-shift signals

• Fixed deadline (datacenter exit, acquisition).
• App is stable, stateful, and poorly understood; few in-house developers.
• Licensing or latency ties the workload to a VM shape.

Refactor/replatform signals

• Bursts or idle periods make PaaS or containers cheaper at scale.
• Need for auto patch, blue-green deploys, or API modernization.
• Security debt (legacy auth) that IaaS perpetuates.

MSP framing

Document TCO for 36 months including backup, monitoring, patching labor, and projected rightsizing. Offer a phase 2 backlog rather than boiling the ocean in migration week one.

Deliverable

One-page decision record per major app: choice, assumptions, and revisit date post-migration.