Lift-and-shift migration is the act of moving existing workloads, as is, to the target cloud-operating foundation already implemented. This type of exercise is usually done against a grouping of applications, by business unit, technology stack, or complexity level of some other type of metric. A lift-and-shift migration in its purest form is literally bit-by-bit copies of existing instances, databases, storage, and so on, and is actually rare, since the cost benefits of doing this to the cloud would be negligible. For example, moving 100 instances from an on-premises data center to the cloud, with no changes to size or taking into consideration scaling options, would most likely result in a higher cost to the company.

The more common derivative of a lift-and-shift is a lift-tinker-shift migration, where the majority of the workloads are moved; however, specific components are upgraded or swapped out for cloud services. For example, moving 100 instances from an on-premises data center to the cloud, but standardizing on a specific operating system (for example, Red Hat Enterprise Edition), moving all databases into a cloud vendor managed service (for example, Amazon Relational Database Service), and storing backup or archive files in a cloud storage blog storage (for example, Amazon Simple Storage Service) would constitute a lift-tinker-shift migration. This type of migration would most likely save the company a lot of money for the business case, take advantage of some of the most mature services in the cloud, and allow for significant long-term advantages with future deployments.