The 5 R's Migration Strategy
Applying the 5 R’s correctly ensures cloud migration is controlled, defensible, and aligned to governance expectations. Every decision is documented, risk-assessed, and auditable, providing clarity for stakeholders and confidence for auditors.
Rehost
(“Lift and Shift”)
Rehosting involves moving applications to the cloud with minimal or no architectural change.
This approach is typically used where speed is a priority, or where applications are stable but need to exit legacy infrastructure. We assess rehosting suitability carefully, ensuring security controls, identity, and network exposure are appropriately reconfigured in the cloud.
Best suited for:
Time-sensitive migrations
Stable, low-complexity workloads
Interim cloud adoption strategies
Replatform
(“Lift, Tinker, and Shift”)
Replatforming introduces targeted improvements without full application redesign — such as moving to managed databases, updated runtimes, or cloud-native services.
This approach balances risk reduction and operational improvement, often delivering better resilience, performance, and cost efficiency while maintaining controlled change.
Best suited for:
Applications needing moderate optimisation
Improved availability or manageability
Reduced operational overhead
Refactor
(Re-architect)
Refactoring involves redesigning applications to fully leverage cloud-native architecture, scalability, and resilience.
This is the most complex option and is typically driven by long-term strategic goals, technical debt reduction, or performance and scalability requirements. We ensure refactoring decisions are justified, scoped, and governed to manage risk and cost.
Best suited for:
Business-critical or customer-facing systems
Long-term cloud-first strategies
Scalability and resilience requirements
Retire
Retiring workloads removes applications that are no longer required, duplicated, or delivering value.
This is a critical but often overlooked step. We help organisations identify systems that can be safely decommissioned, reducing attack surface, licensing costs, and operational complexity, while ensuring data retention and compliance obligations are met.
Best suited for:
Legacy or unused applications
Duplicate or overlapping systems
Risk reduction and cost optimisation
Retain
Retaining workloads means keeping systems where they are, either temporarily or long-term.
This decision is often driven by regulatory constraints, technical limitations, or cost considerations. We ensure retain decisions are explicit, documented, and reviewed, avoiding unmanaged risk or accidental legacy sprawl.
Best suited for:
Systems with compliance or data residency constraints
Highly customised or tightly coupled platforms
Deferred migration scenarios