Introduction
A large US insurer has hired Wipro FullStride Cloud to move about 600 applications out of two ageing data centres whose leases end in 24 months. The applications include policy administration, claims, billing, agent portals, data warehouses and hundreds of smaller internal tools. The program faces a classic trade-off. Lift-and-shift (rehosting virtual machines largely unchanged on the cloud) is fast and lowers migration risk, but it often brings little cost benefit and keeps old architecture. Refactoring to cloud-native (containers, managed databases, serverless, modern data platforms) unlocks agility, scalability and AI readiness, but takes longer, costs more upfront and carries delivery risk. The question asks which to prioritise. I'll clarify, identify the trade-off, understand the product, form a hypothesis, choose metrics, design an experiment, plan analysis, set a decision framework and recommend.
Cloud migration trade-offs are rarely all-or-nothing. Industry practice uses the "7 Rs" (retire, retain, rehost, relocate, replatform, refactor, repurchase). The real question is how to assign applications to these paths under a hard deadline.
Step 1
Clarifying Questions (3 minutes)
- Deadline: Data centre exit in 24 months is a hard constraint; extending leases is expensive.
- Client goals: Reduce infrastructure costs by 25%, improve speed of launching insurance products and prepare data for AI use cases such as claims automation.
- Budget: Fixed program budget, with some flexibility for high-value refactoring.
- Regulation: State insurance regulators and data privacy rules apply; some data must stay in specific regions.
- Client team: Limited cloud-native skills internally; Wipro will run managed cloud operations after migration.
Practice similar questions
Subscribe to access the full answer
.png){kind=logo}
