In the new digital economy, business organizations around the world are in the midst of a major digital transformation, moving their legacy systems to cloud-based environments. Many tech leaders are positive about their cloud investments, with 65% predicting budget increases and 31% expecting no changes for next year, according to the 2024 Foundry Cloud Computing Study.
In this article, we discuss the business viability of migrating legacy software to the cloud, key opportunities for cloud adoptions, and success factors for migrating legacy software to the cloud. If you choose or plan to deploy your application in the cloud, Trutify Technology is happy to help you develop a cloud application from scratch or modernize an existing application.
Although the majority of new applications are specifically designed to function and run in the cloud, and are hosted in the cloud, many businesses still rely on legacy software for day-to-day operations. Not surprisingly, interest in cloud transformation and legacy software migration is growing. Below, we’ve listed some common cloud migration scenarios shared highlights of Trustify technology’s hands-on approach to migrating applications efficiently and securely.
Why migrating to the cloud?
For legacy software, moving to the cloud is an attractive way to lower total cost of ownership and helps businesses remain competitive. Key benefits of moving to the cloud include increased agility, greater flexibility and efficiency, simpler upgrades and high availability when workloads increase. Other advantages are reduced development and operational costs, use of out-of-the-box cloud services, and predictable billing cost structure (PayG – Pay As You Go).
Speaking of practical examples, we can talk about a Trutify technology’s project for an investment firm where we helped to build their portfolio-company analysis platform in the cloud to efficiently store a growing amount of big data from a variety of data sources. Moving to the cloud allows our client the ability to quickly update centralized resources and simplify system maintenance.
Cloud Migration for Legacy Applications: How To Do It?
Application re-hosting
Application re-hosting involves moving existing applications to the cloud. Application rehosting to the cloud is a quick, relatively safe, and easy migration option. However, the cloud benefits are limited and not fully utilized. If a company needs to ensure access to its applications across all locations, partially optimize hardware resource utilization, or engage DevOps for software development and support, we recommend this configuration.
Application re-platforming
Application replatforming involves bringing a legacy application to the cloud and performing some minor changes to the application architecture, without major code changes. This configuration is great for leveraging a number of cloud services, such as migrating on-premises databases to Azure SQL Server to reduce management burden or simplify scalability.
Application re-factoring/re-architecting
Application refactoring/reengineering involves performing significant changes to legacy applications, such as transforming old monolithic architecture into independent, self-contained microservices. This scenario allows leveraging of all types of cloud services for seamless development, operations, and innovation, as well as cloud services capabilities that provide scalability, availability, portability, and flexibility. Along with self-recovery and dynamic loading.
To choose the best suitable cloud migration option, you should consider your application, business requirements, and budget. Also, keep in mind that even though the latter two options are a gateway to other cloud benefits, they require larger investments and introduce significant risks and challenges during the migration process. They are also difficult to implement on legacy applications with complex interdependencies and are becoming obsolete.
Benefits of cloud migration consulting services
Trustify’s technology experts can help you choose the right path and help you create a viable cloud migration strategy.
Go for cloud migration consulting
Trustify Technology’s approach to application migration to the cloud
A reliable technology approach to migrating applications to the cloud
Modernization projects can seem large, risky, and expensive. To minimize the associated risks and ensure a successful cloud migration process, Trustify Technology focuses on:
Creating a business case
The first step in any cloud implementation project is to assess whether it is feasible to migrate the application to the cloud. The benefits of moving to the cloud seem endless, but legacy applications are often large, complex systems that are too expensive and risky to replace or too costly to operate in the cloud (e.g. legacy financial processing systems). To ensure that the effort and investment are worth it, we start every upgrade journey with the following:
- Identification of required improvements.
- In-depth analysis of technology, architecture, data, and infrastructure.
- Consider the security factor.
- Analysis of the migration ROI.
- Migration feasibility report.
- Choosing a strategic approach to cloud migration.
- Minimizes disruption to business processes
Many legacy systems being migrated to the cloud are critical to business operations and should not experience downtime. To ensure the continuous and ongoing digital transformation of companies, we break down the cloud introduction into clear, manageable processes and measured steps that we are always prepared to roll back. We also leverage automated testing to track changes frequently and thoroughly.
Which public cloud provider to choose?
When moving to the public cloud, we recommend that you consider Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure first. Over the years, we’ve watched Amazon and Microsoft continue to improve cloud platform providers with reliable, advanced cloud services that evolve. The two market-leaders of cloud providers differ in pricing, services offerings, partner ecosystem, and available cloud architecture. The choice should be made based on your unique project needs.
You can also consider Google Cloud Platform and Digital Ocean. Both are great if you need a more affordable option.
Increase value with cost-effective and secure cloud adoption
The success of a major legacy upgrade project requires significant cloud expertise. This can be achieved by upskilling and retraining your in-house development team. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do so, you can employ services offered by 3rd party tech providers. Our cloud computing experts at Trustify Technology will be happy to support you every step of the way in your cloud adoption, just contact them.