Methods for Migrating Legacy Applications to the Cloud

Companies lately are looking to move their workloads to the cloud. However, it’s difficult to move all their existing applications. If a company has developed more recently, it’s relatively easy to transfer them over, but it’s trickier with legacy applications, or many other existing applications. Many applications are reliant on the platforms they were built on, or take advantage of high-end systems that are complicated to transfer from. Sometimes it’s a hardware problem, instead. Another problem occurs when companies want to consolidate apps from different platforms into a single platform. They at least want to make sure that the cloud platform they’re moving to can support all their existing & future applications in the same place. Having to manage several different platforms can be difficult & resource-exhausting, and that’s why they’re looking for a new solution. We work with several multi-cloud solutions that offer an interface that makes consolidation run efficiently.

There are several different methods of going about legacy application migration, but there are several things to consider in order to select the right one. The first part of this is to consider why you’re moving to the cloud. Infrastructure costs are one big reason, but most companies are moving for several reasons, rather than just one. There’s scalability, elasticity, reliability, efficiency, storage availability, liability, smart capabilities, usability, or any other abilities.

The first migration method for legacy applications is simple, quick, & still cost-effective. It’s called a “Lift and Shift” method. This means simply rehosting the application in the cloud without any modification. Lift and Shift still reduces infrastructure costs, improves reliability, & increases storage availability, but fails to take advantage of other capabilities. Besides, other methods are usually significantly more cost-effective in the long run.

There’s a method that is very similar to Lift and Shift, called Lift-Adjust-and-Shift. Rather than quickly rehosting, it’s replatforming - optimizing the application for the cloud without completely redeveloping the app. This is still a slow process and requires small tweaks to foundational elements of an application - which means a lot of work anyways. However, it’s a good middle-ground method, and also picks up utility through usability, smart capabilities, & updated reliability.

The third method is fully redeveloping the application. While this is a slow, complicated process, & as costly as it is time-consuming, it’s usually worth the effort in the long run. It optimizes native cloud efficiency and maximizes operational cost-efficiency. Flexibility is a huge advantage to this, and redeveloping is perfect for applications that have long needed redesigning anyways, or otherwise have much to gain from updating.

Other methods are simpler but not as flexible, the first of which is repurchasing. There’s a lot of effort being spent on developing cloud-native applications, and if you look around, you might find one of them suits your needs well enough that you can buy it without having to redesign anything. This still requires transferring the old data and reliance and may not suit your needs perfectly, just well-enough.

Even considering all these reasons to update, companies still find reasons to keep legacy apps on-premise. Perhaps the application isn’t valuable enough to migrate but is worth enough that it wouldn’t make sense to simply retire it altogether. Another reason could be the complexity of the existing application makes it impossible to migrate without redeveloping and redeveloping impossible because the existing application’s current structure is essential to your business. A possible work-around for any reason could be a hybrid system where some of the application remains on-premise but the rest utilizes cloud functions.