Lift And Shift

These types of migrations usually emanate from IT departments that want to get out of the data center business. But some are just looking to save on storage or make operations more agile.

In a lift-and-shift migration, "you take the exact application as it is now, move it to cloud, with same architecture, same setup," Dada said. "Changes are minor."

In that process, an organization might take advantage of "cloudification" services such as CDN, but in principle, the main architecture remains just as it was on-premises, Dada said.

"The additional benefit of this, once it's in the cloud environment, (is) you have a lot more options on how to resize the infrastructure to adjust to the needs of the system and move things around," Dada said.

A secondary benefit is that once workloads are off the corporate infrastructure, IT staff can make changes through a web console without needing to go through the procurement process.