Cloud Migration Benefits and Strategies
Domain 1: Cloud Concepts — Task 1.3: Understand the benefits of and strategies for migration to the AWS Cloud
This chapter explains why organizations move to AWS and how they approach that journey. The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam does not only test whether you know migration tools—it tests whether you understand how migration supports business goals such as reducing risk, improving sustainability, increasing revenue, and modernizing IT operations.
Understanding Cloud Migration
Cloud migration refers to moving applications, data, and workloads from on-premises environments or other cloud providers into AWS. The purpose of migration is not simply to change hosting locations, but to unlock the core benefits of cloud computing, including elasticity, cost optimization, agility, and stronger governance.
From an exam perspective, migration is also closely tied to business outcomes. AWS enables organizations to reduce operational risk through built-in high availability and disaster recovery, improve environmental and sustainability metrics, streamline IT operations through automation, and accelerate innovation by providing instantly scalable infrastructure.
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework provides a structured approach for planning and executing cloud migrations. It organizes cloud adoption into six perspectives, each representing a critical area of transformation.
The Business perspective focuses on aligning cloud investments with business outcomes such as growth and agility. The People perspective addresses workforce readiness, training, and organizational change. Governance ensures risk management, compliance, and ESG reporting. The Platform perspective focuses on architecture and cloud infrastructure. Security covers identity, compliance, and protection of workloads. Operations focuses on day-to-day management, monitoring, and efficiency.
Exam Tip: When a question mentions reducing business risk or improving ESG reporting, it maps to Governance. Increasing revenue or business agility maps to the Business perspective. Improving uptime or efficiency aligns with Operations.
Business Benefits of Migration
Migrating to AWS delivers measurable benefits across technical, financial, and environmental dimensions. Organizations reduce business risk by using AWS’s built-in redundancy, disaster recovery, and compliance capabilities. Sustainability improves because AWS operates energy-efficient data centers and optimizes infrastructure usage across millions of customers.
Migration also enables faster product launches and entry into new markets, which increases revenue potential. At the same time, automation, managed services, and elastic scaling significantly improve operational efficiency by reducing manual IT work and downtime.
Exam Tip: When ESG or sustainability improvements appear in a question, connect them to AWS’s energy-efficient infrastructure and sustainability pillar.
Migration Strategies: The 7 Rs
AWS groups migration approaches into seven common strategies known as the 7 Rs.
Rehost (lift and shift) moves applications with minimal or no changes, often using AWS Application Migration Service. Replatform makes small optimizations, such as moving a database to Amazon RDS, without changing the application architecture. Repurchase replaces existing software with SaaS solutions, such as switching to Salesforce. Refactor or re-architect redesigns applications to be cloud-native, such as breaking monoliths into microservices on AWS Lambda. Retire decommissions outdated systems. Retain keeps some workloads on-premises due to regulatory or technical constraints. Relocate moves entire environments, such as VMware workloads, into AWS without modification.
Exam Tip: Rehost means no changes. Replatform means small optimizations.
AWS Migration Tools and Services
AWS provides purpose-built services to simplify migrations. AWS Migration Hub offers a central dashboard to track migration progress. AWS Application Migration Service automates server rehosting. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) supports continuous replication and minimal-downtime database migrations. AWS Snowball and Snowmobile provide physical devices for massive offline data transfers. AWS DataSync moves large datasets online, and AWS Control Tower establishes a secure, governed multi-account environment.
Exam Tip: Petabyte-scale offline data uses Snowball or Snowmobile. Live database replication uses DMS. Multi-account governance uses Control Tower.
Hands-On Example: Migrating with AWS DMS
AWS DMS supports both full database loads and ongoing change data capture, allowing production systems to remain online during migration. A typical DMS task can migrate existing data and continuously replicate changes until the cutover is complete, minimizing downtime and risk.
This approach is commonly used for enterprise database migrations where business continuity is critical.
Key Exam Reminders
CAF perspectives map directly to business goals—Governance for risk and ESG, Business for revenue, Operations for efficiency. The 7 Rs describe how workloads are moved, from quick lift-and-shift to full cloud-native redesign. Migration tools are chosen based on data size, downtime tolerance, and governance needs.
Exam Tip: Always identify whether a scenario requires bulk offline data transfer, live database replication, or full server migration.
Final Thoughts
Migrating to AWS is not just a technical upgrade—it is a strategic business transformation. The exam will test your ability to connect AWS migration strategies, CAF perspectives, and AWS services to goals such as lowering risk, improving sustainability, increasing agility, and optimizing operations. When you can clearly map business needs to AWS migration solutions, you are prepared for both the Cloud Practitioner exam and real-world cloud adoption projects.
