What Is Application Rehosting?

Application Rehosting, often called "lift and shift", means moving an application to a new environment, typically the cloud, without changing its underlying code, architecture, or functionality.

Rehosting is the fastest and lowest-risk way to get off aging on-premises infrastructure, since nothing about the application itself needs to change, only where it runs. That speed makes it a practical first step for organizations that need to exit a data center contract or reduce infrastructure costs quickly, even if it doesn't unlock the deeper benefits of cloud-native design. It buys time and cost savings now, while a longer-term modernization plan is developed for later phases.

We use rehosting where an application is stable, not a strategic priority for redesign, and the primary goal is infrastructure cost reduction or getting off unsupported hardware quickly. Because the code itself is untouched, this is typically the fastest and cheapest of the modernization strategies to execute, with minimal disruption to users. It is rarely the end state for a modernization program, but rather a first move that removes infrastructure risk immediately, while rearchitecting or rebuilding for genuinely strategic applications is planned as a later, better-resourced phase.