Three migration strategies. Three very different cost curves. Here’s the one your CFO actually wants you to pick.
At https://irpr.io we’ve executed cloud migrations across AWS, GCP, and Azure for mid-market and enterprise teams. The discipline that separates migrations that finish on-budget from migrations that drag for 18 months is the strategy choice, and most teams pick it on engineering preference rather than the cost data.
Lift-and-shift (rehost). Move workloads to cloud with minimal change. Cheapest upfront (typically $80K–$300K for a mid-market estate), fastest to complete (3–6 months). The catch: cloud costs run 30–60% above an optimised setup because you carry over inefficiencies. You’ll re-pay the upfront savings within 24 months in cloud bills.
Replatform (lift-tinker-shift). Move workloads to cloud while making targeted optimisations, managed databases, object storage, autoscaling. Mid-tier upfront (typically $150K–$600K), 6–9 months. Cloud costs land roughly 10–25% above optimal but well below lift-shift. Most mid-market migrations should land here.
Refactor (re-architect). Rewrite for cloud-native patterns, containers, serverless, event-driven, managed services end-to-end. Highest upfront ($400K–$2M+ for non-trivial systems), 9–18 months. Cloud costs typically 20–40% below original on-prem run rates over 3 years, plus the team gets a modern operational model.
Which to pick:
- Refactor when the application is genuinely strategic and you’ll operate it for 5+ more years.
- Replatform when you need cloud benefits but the application’s lifespan is uncertain (default for most mid-market migrations).
- Lift-shift only when you have a hard deadline (data centre lease ending, M&A integration) and refactoring later is on the roadmap.
The expensive mistake is lift-shifting and never refactoring, you pay the cloud premium forever for no benefit.
The full https://irpr.io/services/cloud-migration we run starts with this cost-curve analysis against your actual workload before recommending a strategy.
About IRPR.io
IRPR.io is a global software studio that takes products from Idea to Release. With senior engineers across 50+ countries, the studio designs, builds, and ships custom web applications, mobile apps, SaaS platforms, AI products, and cloud infrastructure for startups, scale-ups, and enterprise teams. Every engagement runs through the proprietary IRPR framework, Idea → Roadmap → Product → Release, with fixed-price commitments and senior-only execution from kickoff to handoff. IRPR.io is the technology arm of https://irpr.agency, a full-service marketing, PR, video, and technology partner. Learn more at https://irpr.io.
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