Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business Practice Question
An enterprise is planning to migrate its on-premises data center to Google Cloud to avoid a hardware refresh cycle. The migration must minimize application changes. Which migration strategy should they prioritize?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Lift and shift (rehost)
Lift and shift (rehost) moves applications as-is to cloud VMs, minimizing changes while avoiding hardware refresh costs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Re-architecting applications to use microservices
Why it's wrong here
Re-architecting to microservices is a high-effort transformation that decomposes a monolithic application into many independently deployable services. It demands changes to data consistency, inter-service communication, API design, and CI/CD pipelines, plus extensive retesting and refactoring of the codebase. This approach goes far beyond the goal of avoiding a hardware refresh and introduces significant migration risk and timeline delay.
- ✗
Replacing applications with SaaS
Why it's wrong here
Replacing applications with SaaS, also known as 'repurchase,' means abandoning the existing on-premises application and buying a cloud-hosted SaaS subscription instead. This requires converting or migrating data to the new vendor's schema, reengineering business processes to match the SaaS product, and retraining users, effectively jettisoning the current application rather than migrating it. It does not reduce the need for IT resources in the same way as a direct lift-and-shift and fails to preserve the existing workload's behavior.
- ✓
Lift and shift (rehost)
Why this is correct
Lift and shift (rehost) migrates workloads by copying the existing virtual machines or physical servers to cloud instances with minimal modification. It preserves the OS, middleware, and application configuration, so no code changes or data restructuring are needed, and the enterprise can decommission on-premises hardware right away. This is the fastest migration path and directly avoids capital expenditure on new servers, making it the correct choice for a data center migration with minimal effort.
- ✗
Refactoring to use managed services like Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Refactoring to managed services like Cloud SQL means re-platforming the application to use a cloud provider's database-as-a-service instead of the current self-managed database. This requires modifying application connection strings, converting SQL dialect, and potentially changing schema or handling differences in database features, followed by full regression testing. While it may reduce operational overhead, it introduces application-level changes and risks, which contradicts the stated objective of a low-effort migration without hardware refresh.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the GCDL exam.