The last decade has witnessed a tremendous growth in Cloud Migration. Today, Cloud Computing has become one of the most disruptive phases in modern IT and an increasing number of enterprises are adopting the trend to realize cost and scale efficiencies. But, CIOs and other technology leaders face numerous challenges while developing a cloud implementation strategy for their organization in order to meet their business goals.
In this article, we will discuss a Cloud Implementation strategy for legacy applications focusing on the common benefits and challenges of these migration processes.
Assess Individual Application Requirements
Before moving a legacy application to the cloud, it is important to assess the requirements of individual applications taking users and organizational needs into consideration. As the migration process is largely invisible to the users, moving a client-server application to the cloud without assessing the outcomes carefully can lead to higher angst among users. This will affect the productivity and can put future application migrations at risk.
Consider the Application Architecture
Move your traditional applications to cloud only if you see an obvious benefit. Cloud offers operationalized economics, improved simplicity and instant scalability but simply moving a traditional client-server based ERP infrastructure to cloud – as a lift-and-shift operation – without taking appropriate connectivity decisions can have disastrous consequences for users. Most database applications handle network latency poorly and shifting just the server side of a client-server application to the cloud will often increase latency beyond tolerable levels. Also, these types of applications were designed with private data centers in mind and rebuilding so much surrounding infrastructure in the cloud can often negate the financial and simplicity benefits.
Decide a Migration Process
Moving your legacy apps can be done in two different ways:
- Copying the VMs to cloud and restarting them at the provider: This yields the best outcomes when the speed of deployment is the main concern. But there may be some complexities due to the surrounding infrastructure as mentioned earlier.
- Rebuilding the application environment from scratch: Legacy App migration is a good opportunity to clean up and ensure that the application operating environment adheres to the latest best practices. Thus, it makes sense to rebuild the application environment considering the organizational goals and budget.
Prioritize the Applications before Migrating
Before you migrate your applications to the cloud, decide the order in which you want to “make the move”. Generally, very few organizations can simply migrate all their applications at once. Thus, prioritization is critical. These suggestions will help you prioritize your applications effectively:
- Start with non-critical services: Starting with non-critical services will help your staff get an idea about the overall process and learn lessons that can be applied to move critical workloads. You will also learn about how your cloud service provider supports your workloads. This will help you make the required changes as you move your critical applications to the cloud.
- Migrate appropriate services to SaaS: For many companies these days, operating local collaboration environments isn’t effective. Moving to SaaS passes the responsibility of managing servers to the service providers and reduces costs by great extent. But, at the same time, many providers might not offer all the features which the companies are currently using. If your company is running a heavily customized environment, do a feature-by-feature analysis and decide if your company can survive after losing a particular feature. Otherwise, prefer to stay local.
Likewise, cloud-based reporting services can be scaled to almost unlimited capacity and you won’t have to worry about scaling the local compute and storage resources. Thus, replacing your local data analysis services with cloud-based ones would prove helpful. - Decide the applications that will stay local: Finally, account for those applications that need to stay local. It is important to keep the services like DNS, DHCP, and print servers for infrastructure support and one to two domain controllers for authentication purposes. Many companies prefer keeping the critical items local as a risk management strategy. However, this is starting to change with an increase in the robust and secure working environments.
One of the most critical parts of this migration process is choosing the right vendor to work with. It is important to ensure that your cloud vendor has the capabilities to manage and host your cloud enabled applications whilst helping you to control costs, SLAs and security that your business needs.
Sysfore offers your organization an abundance of cloud-relates skills and insights, covering all aspects of the transition to an environment in which legacy systems and cloud services co-exist. Write to our experts at info@sysfore.com or get in touch with us at +91 (80) 4110-5555 to get free consultation!