When everything around you is changing—your business, your customers, and the tools you use—it’s easy for digital transformation to feel like a huge mountain to climb. Recently, we worked with a client to navigate this challenge, leveraging the Six R’s of Cloud Migration as a framework for simplifying decision-making and enabling fast action.

Complexity Slows Transformation

A legacy ecosystem can feel like a puzzle with missing pieces—a piecemeal system that lacks the flexibility or scalability modern businesses need. Our client faced the challenge of modernizing their UI without disrupting core systems or delaying service delivery. We needed something to help guide our revitalization project, allowing us to take a giant step forward without introducing giant risk.

The Six R’s Untangle Complexity & Unveil a Path to Modernization

The Six R’s—Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Retire, and Repurchase—helped us map the migration priorities clearly, breaking the existing situation into discrete workstreams for sorting based on complexity and urgency. With AWS as our value-added partner, bringing insights from their experience modernizing other clients, we quickly identified which assets to migrate as-is, which to optimize, and which to replace entirely.

• Retain:Keep the system or application as-is in its new environment.

• Rehost:Lift and shift technology to a new environment without significant changes.

• Replatform:Lift, make minor adjustments, and shift technology to the new environment.

• Refactor:Make significant changes to the application to better fit the new environment.

• Retire:Decommission systems or applications that are no longer useful.

• Repurchase:Replace existing systems with new, often SaaS-based, solutions.

This structured approach isn’t just efficient—it lays a future-proof foundation for ongoing innovation.

A Smarter Start with AWS

Thanks to the Six R’s framework and our ability to unlock the Experience-Based Accelerator (EBA) program through our partnership with AWS, we delivered a transformation strategy in just 3-6 weeks. Our status as an AWS partner allowed us to leverage this exclusive resource, ensuring a roadmap that empowers the client to adapt to market changes without missing a beat.

Your Digital Transformation: Ready to Assess?

The Six R’s are more than migration tactics—they’re a benchmark for evaluating whether your ecosystem is ready for the demands of tomorrow. That's something we could all stand to consider as the new year begins.

If you’re ready to move fast and make things, reach out to get the conversation started.