The word "migration" means basically taking something and moving it elsewhere as a permanent place. Migrations have a multitude of reasons and those are trivialized by calling it a migration. The power of the Cloud is really to offer a multitude of capabilities not just a cheaper venue for your applications and services.
There are plenty of reasons for moving to the cloud and with the introduction of containerization and hybrid systems, it seems to be getting more complicated. At the very least when you move to the cloud you need to think how your business strategy can leverage the cloud correctly. There is a multitude of services available on the cloud that you should consider for enhancing applications. If you consider adding a streaming data component with real-time information, it is probably a few clicks to add the service. Authenticating IoT data (In Azure about 4 clicks to activate). Moving that information into an AI application layer (a few clicks to activate and a data scientist to navigate the algorithms available). How about reducing license fees by integrating a few databases together for leverage by multiple applications? The Cloud is less about cost and more about being able to leverage your data as a strategic asset. Delivering competitive analytics is something you should look to improve leveraging the cloud. While some think in terms of operating systems, compute power, and storage others are planning cloud implementations to become data-driven companies. If you have a migration partner that simply rehosts your application you need to rethink how Cloud Migration is really more about competitive advantage. The opportunity to leverage cloud can weaponize your analytics, bulletproof your applications with resilient architectures, and remove performance problems. To do all this you will need to look at this as leveraging your migration to really be more about the paradigm change that the cloud can bring.
Rehosting is a start and while it is fast you should consider re-platforming. While a replatform takes longer and requires some development work you end up with applications that scale that much better and with higher availability. Sales applications need to be up 24x7 for a global reseller so consider the cost if you are down for a day. Cloud architectures can be set up to be highly available and resilient. Taking even more advantage of cloud you can consider multiple cloud services based on how much data you are moving and the compute power required. Some Cloud services make sense in Azure if you want to leverage the Data Factory but simple large database moves may make sense in Redshift on AWS. Applying a cognitive search function makes sense on Azure if you are a Microsoft shop but you may want to extend it across other Cloud services. Kubernetes can really manage the new age of containerization and avoid the idea of relying on one vendor. We are consistently seeing our customers rely more on this approach than a single cloud solution. As you can see Cloud services, containerization as it relates to customer digitization, digitalization and transformations have become a lot more sophisticated than just a move to the cloud for some it is gaining competitive advantage. So maybe we need to call it something else entirely.