The 7 Rs of cloud migration, explained for decision-makers

A cloud migration is really dozens of smaller decisions, one for each application or workload. The 7 Rs give you a shared vocabulary for those decisions, so technical teams and budget holders can agree on what happens to each system and why.

The seven strategies

Retire

Switch off applications nobody needs. Most estates have more of these than people expect, and retiring them is the cheapest migration there is.

Retain

Keep a system where it is for now. Common for applications nearing end of life, or with dependencies that make moving them risky today.

Rehost

Lift and shift to the cloud without changes. Fast and low risk, but you won’t see many cloud-native benefits until later.

Replatform

Make a few targeted changes during the move, such as switching to a managed database, to gain benefits quickly.

Repurchase

Replace the application with a SaaS product. Often the right answer for email, CRM and HR systems.

Refactor

Re-architect for cloud-native services. The most effort, but the biggest gains in scalability and cost for systems that matter.

Relocate

Move an entire platform, such as a VMware estate, to the cloud with minimal change.

How to choose

Start with business value and risk, not technology. A system that differentiates your organisation and is costly to run is a candidate for refactoring. A stable commodity system is usually better rehosted or repurchased.

Check dependencies early. Applications that share databases or integrations often need to move together, which shapes your migration waves.

Be honest about skills and timelines. Refactoring everything at once is rarely realistic. Most successful migrations rehost or replatform first, then modernise the systems that justify it.

Where to begin

A migration assessment maps every workload to one of the 7 Rs, groups them into waves and estimates the effort and cost of each. It turns “move to the cloud” into a plan you can fund and track.