Cloud now represents over 30% of total enterprise IT spend, up from low‑teens just a few years ago, confirming cloud as core infrastructure rather than an “alternative” platform. One of the biggest challenges with cloud adoption is the continued and excessive use of the “lift and shift” migration approach.

To meet aggressive migration timelines, many enterprises move existing data center workloads to cloud without re-architecting them. The same capacity continues to run 24/7, year-round just like before, but now in the cloud.

After a lift and shift migration, enterprises pay for idle servers 24/7 – at the same cost as on premises, but now in the cloud – offering zero cloud benefits.

This limits their ability to truly unlock the value of cloud adoption and prevents organizations from realizing key cloud benefits such as pay-as-you-go, on-demand provisioning. It also negates the advantage of autoscaling, where capacity should ideally start small and scale up only when required.

The hidden cost of lift and shift migration: Enterprise cloud migrations often miss their value targets not because of technical failures, but because of how workloads are moved. The approach matters as much as the destination.

Lift and shift creates an invisible lock-in: organizations become accustomed to fixed-cost cloud billing and never pressure-test whether re-architecture is worth it. Meanwhile, cloud bills compound and the window to unlock real value keeps narrowing.

What unlocks cloud value: The true value of cloud is elasticity – paying only for what you use, when you use it. Lift and shift trades this for speed-to-migrate, locking organizations into cloud costs without cloud advantages. Re-architect before you migrate, or plan to revisit it soon after.

When lift and shift becomes a strategic blind spot: To meet aggressive migration timelines or align with business imperatives like data center exit, enterprises often adopt a lift‑and‑shift approach as their preferred migration strategy. In such scenarios, it is strongly recommended to apply FinOps best practices to maintain cost control and financial visibility. Key best practices are outlined below:

  • Optimize cloud resources through rightsizing and appropriate SKU selection
  • Drive rate optimization using reservations or savings plans
  • Identify and eliminate waste caused by unused or underutilized resources
  • Enable effective monitoring of cloud resources and cost consumption

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that re‑architecting workloads is the most effective way to fully leverage cloud‑native services and maximize long‑term value. However, in an initial lift-and-shift scenario, this approach may involve additional costs and extend the payback period.

Call-to-action with FinOps by design: Moving to the cloud is not a strategy; architecting for the cloud is. Enterprises must move beyond simply replicating their on‑premises data centers in the cloud. The real value emerges when workloads are engineered for cloud‑native principles, with deliberate consideration for how they are designed, provisioned, scaled, and eventually retired – not just where they run.

While the destination may be the same, the approach matters. Adopting FinOps by design early in the journey is what determines whether an organization truly captures the promised business value from the cloud.

Instead of retrofitting FinOps principles during the operations phase, it is increasingly recommended to embed FinOps by design from the outset – beginning with the migration strategy. This approach enables organizations to realize the benefits of cloud adoption early in the journey. Additionally, once workloads are live, enterprises often find it difficult to modify the ecosystem, as changes during the operations phase typically require significant transformation efforts and introduce higher risk. The infographic below highlights a few key FinOps principles that can be integrated during the design and migration phase to unlock the true value of cloud adoption.