Rapid Application Migration

Rapid application migration, commonly referred to as “lift & shift,” is a typical starting point in a life sciences company’s cloud adoption journey.

Lift & Shift simply means re-hosting on-prem applications in the cloud. As long as the application is cloud ready, there is no new development or code because you aren’t changing technical or business functionality.

Rapid application migration is best suited for GxP applications that have a low volume of transactional data, use a simple web-based interface, and have less business impact.

To learn more about this specific point in the cloud adoption journey, watch this short clip from a recent webinar where Stepheni Norton discusses rapid application migration.

Watch the full-length on-demand webinar How to Maximize Your GxP Use of the Public Cloud

Common Challenges

Regulated companies tend to experience common challenges when taking this first step in their cloud adoption journey.

• Deploying webservers and applications on-prem is time consuming and costly, and it’s difficult to maintain security and compliance
• Data stored at multiple facilities prevents accessibility and shared insights across the enterprise
• Managing development, test, and production environments is labor intensive and expensive

Things to Consider

With a basic Lift & Shift, you can:

• Create a plan and how-to playbook on the governance and operation of a GxP-compliant cloud
• Reduce or eliminate dependencies on other processes
• Mitigate security and compliance risks
• Take advantage of scalable storage capacity
• Minimize your software and hardware costs
• Map your systems to machine type and size
• Save money with accurate sizing of cloud infrastructure
• Implement best practice management tools to enable platforms to work together as a single, optimized infrastructure with a hybrid cloud
• Provide an opportunity to re-imagine your business with regulated workloads in the public cloud (AI/ML)

USDM's Cloud Assurance Benefits

USDM's Cloud Assurance provides several deliverables to assist in your cloud journey, including:

• Vendor Assurance Report—USDM examines the cloud provider's infrastructure before transitioning your on-premises environment to the public cloud to ensure that your compliance criteria are met.
• SaaS Readiness Assessment—We confirm that your bespoke applications are cloud ready to ensure the custom-made application is able to run outside of its current infrastructure.
• Lift & Shift Accelerator—Stay in scope and on track. It is tempting to make tweaks and add functionality when you are moving to the cloud, but these increase the scope, time, and effort in development and validation.

It is tempting to make tweaks and add functionality when you are moving to the cloud, but every change increases the scope, time, and effort in development and validation. Stay in scope, and a lift & shift stays fast.

What Business Outcomes Can I Expect?

After completing this first step in your public cloud journey, your IT teams will gain experience with simpler workloads, lower software and hardware costs, and better labor utilization. You will be able to map your systems to machine type and size, see estimated costs, create a cloud migration roadmap that saves you money, and achieve more accurate sizing of your cloud infrastructure. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Are you ready to take the next step?

Lift & Shift will benefit your organization by providing an initial fast, cost-effective migration; improved performance of your applications; enhanced security; and a simple first step in your cloud journey, ultimately leading to faster innovation and a competitive advantage in the industry.

Read on about data migration (backup and archive) or rapid application migration.

Learn More

We invite you to watch our webinar How to Maximize Your GxP Use of the Public Cloud or read our white paper Regulated GxP Workloads in the Public Cloud to learn more about USDM’s public cloud solution.