Businesses are investing substantial funds and efforts into migrating workloads from on-premises infrastructure to public clouds, in part motivated by the hypothesis that, once cloud-based, those workloads will be relatively easy to move from one cloud provider to another. Unfortunately, the reality is unlikely to be so simple.

It’s been estimated that about half of all workloads running in cloud are “lift and shift” migrations that aim to replicate existing on-premises workloads into a more cost-efficient, scalable, and flexible environment.