What is Cloud Migration?
2026-10-27
Over the past 10–15 years, an increasing number of IT workloads have shifted from on-premise infrastructure to cloud service provider platforms. In broad terms, cloud migration refers to the process of moving applications, data, and workloads from an organization's local IT environment to the cloud. This transition can involve an entire infrastructure or specific components, such as servers, datasets, or individual services.
Migrating to the cloud often requires significant changes to an organization's IT architecture. Common migration strategies include: Lift-and-Shift (Rehosting): Migrating existing virtual machines with minimal to no modifications; Replatforming: Partially modifying and adapting systems to leverage managed cloud services; Refactoring (Re-architecting): Substantially redesigning the application architecture—often transitioning from legacy monolithic setups to containers and microservices.