New Projects

This path comes into play when companies decide to change the application they're using for a particular business function, be it e-commerce, human resource management or collaboration.

"You might as well start from scratch in the cloud," Dada said.  "Starting from scratch gives you a lot more flexibility."

New projects can take advantage of more cloud services from the get-go, like database-as-a-service offerings, multiple availability zones, and monitoring tools that create a more dynamic environment.

Unlike lift-and-shift, there's no overhead to migrate an existing workload.

"You might need to preserve and migrate data, but not all the architecture of the application," Dada said.

Because new projects can encapsulate packaged and custom-built applications, and can live on-premises or in the cloud, they usually involve hybrid architectures, Dada said.