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Which approach to cloud migration will work best for your organisation? AWS’ seven ‘Rs’ of migration are designed to help you answer that question. They represent seven different approaches for moving your business to the cloud, written by AWS to guide their customers through the advantages and disadvantages of each option.
We asked Bruce McLeod, AWS Practice Lead for Datacom Australia, to explain the seven Rs and provide his advice on how to make an organisation’s cloud migration a success.
This approach decommissions applications that are no longer providing value to a business. They might be outdated, duplicated, unpopular or no longer applicable. Once you’ve identified these apps, you can retire them to streamline your systems and potentially make big savings.
Some apps just need to stay where they are. If a business operates a bespoke on-premises system, one that is extremely complex, connected to physical equipment or required for a specific compliance or security use case, there may be little value moving it to the cloud. This is particularly common in the medical and financial industries where some core business functions have been in place for decades.
This is the classic ‘lift and shift’, where you pick up all your applications and move them to the cloud. Fast and straightforward, this is a popular option when a deadline is looming. While businesses wanting to drive down costs often take this approach, it can backfire, as noted in Datacom’s 2025 Cloud and Infrastructure report. Many organisations are finding that cloud isn’t delivering the returns they expected and a key reason for that can be the lift and shift approach used incorrectly, particularly where legacy systems are moved with minimal modernisation.
“They see the cloud as a way to save money and done correctly, it most definitely can be. But done incorrectly, it’s the opposite. A classic lift and shift can result in a business asking, ‘Why is it more expensive? That is not what our business case predicted.’ On investigation, we see costs increase because you’re running cloud-based infrastructure the way you used to run on-premise infrastructure,” McLeod explains.
On-premises infrastructure is typically overprovisioned, he explains. By recreating that in the cloud, you can find yourself paying for far more than you need. It’s like buying a ute to tow your boat six times a year and then wondering why it costs so much to run all year round. With the cloud, you can have a Mini Cooper that upgrades itself to a Ford Ranger six times a year when you need extra horsepower. You can then switch back to a Mini when you’re done, so you’re only ever paying for the right amount of horsepower.
Refactoring, or rearchitecting, is the most complex option, which should result in excellent reliability, long-term scalability and performance. It fully utilises the cloud, reduces long-term costs and improves organisational agility. This is the most resource-intensive option, because it does take planning and imagination to optimise outcomes. However, that planning doesn’t necessarily take a long time:
“We have tools to help drive modernisation decisions quickly. The most important thing is to consider the key events in the roadmap for the applications and their operational environments. Is there an upcoming hardware refresh, software renewal or contract expiration? When it comes to these events, businesses need to move from tactical responses to strategic planning.”
Generally, a refactor can be turned around quickly for small businesses, with migrations taking as little as a few weeks or even days. For large critical institutions, the full process might take several years, but the benefits are levels of scalability and reliability that cannot be matched on-premises.
Also known as ‘lift, shift and tinker’. Replatforming aims to strike a balance between a lift and shift and refactoring. It’s faster than refactoring and typically leads to better long-term outcomes than rehosting alone.
“We rarely lift and shift,” says McLeod. “It’s nearly always lift, shift and tinker. There’s a real nuance in deciding whether you can, for example, upgrade from an SQL server running on a Windows Server. Do you just use a Windows Server–based instance? Run it on Linux instead, to remove the licence cost? Or should you move the database to AWS Relational Database Service? Conversely it might be as simple as moving to the latest supported version of an operating system when the server is migrated.”
Also known as ‘drop and shop’, a repurchase ditches your old app licences and replaces them with new cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) models. The best approach is to combine repurchasing with replatforming or refactoring, says McLeod.
“History shows it is rarely build or buy, but instead how much of each? When considering this pathway, the business process is a key consideration. If I am going to move to SaaS, should I adapt my current process, or do I need to customise the software. Increasingly, the ability for AI to interact with a platform and the ability to string multiple tools together in an agentic workflow, is a key repurchasing consideration.”
In some cases, virtual environments can be moved as is to the cloud with minimal disruption. In practice, this is rare, says McLeod, because it tends to drive up total costs, particularly when moving from one hosting solution to another and still carrying the same licence burden. Instead, customers find replatforming to be the better option.
While the seven Rs focus on the how, businesses typically decide why to migrate to the cloud for one of five reasons, says McLeod. The first is building a data-driven business, using the cloud to liberate their data, increase visibility and easily analyse. This is usually a very successful driver.
Second, some organisations aim to solve a key customer problem, using the cloud to enhance customer experience (CX) – this can lead to very good outcomes.
A third reason is improving efficiency by optimising innovation and planning for continuous improvement.
The fourth driver allows businesses to enter and take over a market, arriving late and introducing disruption.
Finally, some companies want to embrace new technology, even if they don’t know why or how to do this effectively. Without guidance, this can lead to an ineffective migration, with less than expected results.
The seven Rs are a great starting point and essential for developing your migration strategy, but the real value comes when you use your migration journey to drive innovation and CX improvements, McLeod says.
“It’s important for businesses to think about the outcome they want to drive. This is a framework for the mechanics of getting your business from on-premises into the cloud, which can be helpful. First, though, you really need to ask, ‘What do I want to get out of this? How do I use the cloud as an enabler to achieve those goals?’”
Migration can be a lever for business transformation. The right migration strategy should help unlock outcomes like faster feature delivery, reduced operational overheads, better use of data or greater scalability. Start with the outcome you want and work backwards from there. With the right support your business can realise all the advantages of cloud-based applications.
