Move off your aging data center. Land in a cloud where a real engineer answers the phone.
You don't need to refactor your stack to escape a costly on-prem refresh, a noisy server closet, or a lease that's about to renew. Lift and shift gets you out of the data center business — fast — without rewriting applications that already work.
The question isn't whether to move. It's where you land. Because landing in a hyperscaler often means trading one set of headaches for another: ticket queues instead of engineers, variable bills instead of predictable ones, and shared-tenancy performance instead of dedicated resources.
IntelliData is the third option.
What lift and shift actually is (and isn't)
Lift and shift — also called rehosting — moves your applications, servers, and data from on-premises infrastructure into a cloud environment with little to no changes to the application itself. Your software runs the same way it did in your server room. The hardware underneath just isn't yours anymore.
It isn't a re-architecture. It isn't a SaaS replacement. It's the fastest, lowest-risk path off aging infrastructure — when the destination is built for it.
Lift and shift is the right call when you have:
- A data center lease ending or a hardware refresh you'd rather not fund
- Stable legacy applications that work fine and don't need to be rewritten
- FDA-validated, HIPAA-bound, or CMMC-scoped environments where re-architecting introduces audit risk
- AutoCAD, Revit, BIM 360, or similar workloads that need real GPU horsepower, not shared-tenancy throttling
- A small IT team that can't absorb a multi-quarter cloud refactoring project
If that's you, keep reading.
With AWS or Azure, you get a destination. With IntelliData, you get a partner.
Most "lift and shift" providers will happily move you to a hyperscaler and hand you a console. Then the surprises start.
| Hyperscalers (AWS / Azure) | IntelliData Private Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Support | Tiered tickets, offshore escalation, hours to first response | A named engineer who knows your environment. Level 5 issues responded to in under 1 business hour, per our SLA. |
| Pricing | Variable monthly bills. Egress fees. Surprise charges as workloads scale. | Flat monthly fee. Firewall, backups, support, and bandwidth included. |
| Performance | Shared tenancy. Noisy neighbors. Throttled bandwidth. | Dedicated resources. SSD storage. GPU-powered VDI. Unlimited bandwidth. |
| Compliance | Shared-responsibility model — you build it. | SOC 2 Type 2 examined by an independent third-party auditor. HIPAA-ready. CMMC-aligned. |
| Outage blast radius | Region-wide cascades. One DNS race condition in us-east-1 took down Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring, Roblox, Coinbase, and Signal on October 20, 2025. | Smaller, isolated environments. Faster recovery. Fewer dominoes. |
| Relationship | You are an account number. | You are a client our team knows by name. |
That outage above wasn't a one-off. AWS attributed it to a latent race condition in DynamoDB's DNS management system that produced an incorrect empty DNS record automation failed to repair. Nine days later, on October 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure went down — Alaska Airlines lost key systems, and Azure attributed the incident to a faulty tenant configuration deployment process that lasted more than eight hours. On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare crashed and took X, ChatGPT, and roughly 40 million websites with it.
When the hyperscalers' DNS systems sneeze, the internet catches pneumonia. When you're on a smaller, dedicated platform, the blast radius is yours alone — and the engineers fixing it know your name.
How an IntelliData migration actually runs
1. Discovery and dependency mapping (week 1). A real engineer — not a sales engineer who disappears after signature — walks your environment with you. We map applications, dependencies, data volumes, integration points, and compliance scope. You get a written migration plan with a realistic timeline and a fixed monthly cost for the destination environment.
2. Pre-flight build (weeks 2–3). We provision your private cloud environment in parallel with your production. Firewall configured. Backups configured. Access controls mapped to your team's roles. Compliance posture documented from day one — because under our SOC 2 Type 2 scope, controls must operate effectively across the full audit period, not just at go-live.
3. Cutover (a weekend, usually). Most lift-and-shift cutovers happen Friday night to Monday morning. Your team tests Saturday. We're on the line the whole time — same engineers you've been working with, not a hand-off to an "implementation team."
4. Day-two operations (forever after). Per our SLA documentation, Level 5 issues — anything stopping productivity — get a response in under 1 business hour. Level 4 in under 2. Level 3 in under 4. No tier-one chatbot triage. The first person you reach can actually fix things.
What's included in the monthly price
- Dedicated compute and SSD storage (no shared-tenancy throttling)
- Managed firewall
- Encrypted backups with documented retention
- Unlimited bandwidth (no egress fees, ever)
- Tiered SLA support, response times documented in writing
- A named technical contact who knows your stack
What's not included: bill shock, egress surprises, ticket queues, or a sales rep who forgets your name after the contract signs.
Who this is built for
FDA-regulated firms retiring validated on-prem environments — we support 21 CFR Part 11 audit trails and DR documentation.
AEC firms running AutoCAD, Revit, and BIM 360, where render performance and large-file sync make or break the workday.
Healthcare practices that need HIPAA-aligned hosting with a real BAA and PHI protection baked in.
Financial services firms facing fiduciary and audit pressure on uptime and encryption.
DoD contractors preparing for CMMC Level 2 with controlled environments and ITAR-aware hosting.
Mid-market firms burned by hyperscaler bills, support queues, and over-provisioned services they never asked for.
Ready to see what your environment looks like on a cloud built for your business?
Move beyond big-box cloud. Discover the IntelliData difference — predictable cost, dedicated performance, and a team that picks up the phone.
Or request a custom migration proposal — including a side-by-side comparison of your current cloud spend versus a flat IntelliData monthly fee — and we'll have it back to you in 48 hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will my applications need to be rewritten?
No. That's the point of lift and shift. Your applications run the same way they do on-premises — they just don't live in your server room anymore. If, later, you want to optimize specific workloads for cloud-native architecture, we can help with that as a separate phase. Most clients don't need to.
How long does a typical migration take?
Discovery and planning take 1–2 weeks. The build runs 1–2 weeks in parallel. Cutover is usually a single weekend. Total: 3–5 weeks for most mid-market environments. Larger or more complex environments — multi-site, heavy compliance scope, or unusual integrations — take longer, and we'll tell you that upfront.
What about workloads that aren't a good fit for lift and shift?
Some applications genuinely need refactoring before they move — typically older monoliths with hard-coded dependencies, or systems near end-of-life where rehosting just defers the real decision. During discovery, we'll tell you which workloads to lift, which to retire, and which to address separately. We won't move something we think you shouldn't move.
How does pricing compare to AWS or Azure?
Most clients see predictable monthly bills materially lower than equivalent hyperscaler configurations once egress, support tiers, and add-ons are factored in. Configuration-dependent — request a side-by-side comparison with your current invoice and we'll show you the real number for your environment.
Is your platform compliance-ready?
Yes. The IntelliData Hosting Platform is SOC 2 Type 2 examined by an independent third-party auditor against the AICPA Trust Services Criteria, covering the period January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024 — meaning controls were tested as operating effectively across the entire year, not just at a point in time. HIPAA-aligned hosting is standard. CMMC-aligned configurations are available. Specific framework support is documented per engagement.
