Lift and Shift Migration to AWS for Cloud Modernization

How a legacy hosted application in a global financial training company gained performance, visibility, and scalability through AWS migration.

Background:

A growing organization was operating a business-critical application on a legacy managed hosting environment, where both the application and database were co-located on a single server and fully managed by an external provider. While the setup worked initially, increasing traffic, performance demands, and operational complexity exposed limitations that slowed innovation and impacted reliability. The organization needed a faster, more transparent, and scalable infrastructure to support future growth.

The Challenge:

Monolithic application and database hosted on a single server

• Limited visibility into infrastructure health, logs, and metrics

• Slow performance and increasing latency under higher load

• Inability to scale resources quickly to meet demand

• Dependency on external teams for troubleshooting and incident resolution

• No CI/CD or modern DevOps practices in place

Solution: Lift and Shift Migration to AWS

A Lift and Shift (rehosting) migration strategy was adopted to move workloads to AWS quickly with minimal application changes. The solution decoupled the application and database layers, established cloud-native monitoring, and enabled modern DevOps workflows—while preserving existing business logic.

Key elements of the AWS architecture included:

• Compute on EC2 with load balancing and auto-scaling

• Database migrated to Amazon RDS with high availability

• Centralized monitoring and alerts using CloudWatch

• Secure storage and backups using Amazon S3

• CI/CD pipelines integrated for faster, reliable deployments

Results:

• Significant improvement in application performance and responsiveness

• Full infrastructure visibility with real-time monitoring and alerts

• Faster incident detection and resolution through internal DevOps ownership

• Elastic scalability, allowing resources to be adjusted in minutes instead of days

• Higher deployment frequency enabled by CI/CD pipelines

• Improved reliability and fault tolerance through managed database services

Conclusion:

By executing a Lift and Shift migration to AWS, the organization transitioned from a constrained, opaque hosting model to a modern, scalable cloud foundation. The move delivered immediate gains in performance, control, and operational efficiency—while positioning the platform for future cloud-native enhancements. This case study demonstrates how even a straightforward migration can unlock substantial business value when paired with the right cloud architecture and DevOps practices.

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