Cloud migration programs often falter when they apply a single approach uniformly across a diverse application portfolio. A simple lift-and-shift works well for some workloads, but forces others into an architecture that never fits, carrying forward the same performance and maintenance problems the migration was meant to solve, now running on someone else’s infrastructure at a similar or higher cost.
Matching strategy to workload reality
Assessing each application against its actual constraints—licensing terms, data gravity, latency sensitivity, and the cost of a rewrite versus the cost of ongoing technical debt—determines whether it should be rehosted quickly, refactored to use cloud-native services, or retired altogether if it no longer earns its keep. Applications tightly coupled to on-premises hardware or requiring extremely low, deterministic latency may belong on-premises indefinitely, and forcing them to the cloud creates risk without corresponding benefit.
Sequencing matters as much as strategy: migrating dependent systems out of order creates connectivity and latency problems that surface only after cutover, when rollback is expensive.
JIG builds migration roadmaps that treat each workload on its own merits, sequencing moves to minimize risk and maximize the return on migration investment.