Today’s cloud strategies revolve around two distinct poles: the “lift and shift” approach, in which applications and associated data are moved to the cloud without being redesigned; and the “cloud-first” approach, in which applications are developed or redesigned specifically for the cloud.

By far the fastest approach is to lift and shift the whole environment, says Matthew Hon, CTO for public sector at technology services company Fujitsu Americas, as rewriting applications for the cloud could take more than two years to complete.