United States | English
Locations Careers Contact Us
← Cloud Transformation · Case studies Cross-industry · Case study

Lift, shift & modernise

A migration factory that moves a legacy estate to the cloud and modernises it on the way — matching each workload to the right path rather than rehosting everything.

Method
Migration factory
Decision
The 6 Rs, per workload
Outcome
Modernised, not just moved

Overview

A sizeable on-prem estate needed to move to the cloud — compute, storage, and networking that had grown over years. Rehosting alone rarely pays off: industry analysis from Accenture notes that much of cloud's value comes from modernising applications, not simply relocating them, with a meaningful share of cloud spend going to modernisation.

The pattern is a repeatable migration factory: assess each workload, decide its path with the 6 Rs, and move it onto a hardened landing zone — modernising where it earns its keep.


The challenge

Our approach

  1. Built an assess-and-move playbook applying the 6 Rs — rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain — per workload
  2. Used configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to standardise and automate server and application setup at scale
  3. Replatformed and refactored where modernisation clearly paid off, rather than rehosting by default
  4. Landed migrated workloads on a hardened landing zone with CI/CD pipelines and multi-AZ resilience

Results & business impact

Tools & technology

Migration factory (6 Rs) Ansible Chef Puppet Terraform CI/CD Multi-AZ

Representative reference architecture from the NovasIQ cloud practice, illustrating how we approach this pattern. It reflects standard, proven cloud-engineering practice rather than a specific named client engagement, and outcomes are described qualitatively. The modernisation context above reflects published Accenture analysis. Industry figures are drawn from public research: Gartner, Accenture and Flexera.

More case studies