Migrating Legacy Applications to the Cloud: A How To Guide

Is your organization migrating legacy applications to a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Services), or VMware?

As today’s businesses seek ways to be more efficient, it’s becoming clear that legacy application migration is probably the greatest ways to achieve this. Older applications and integrations can improve performance and security alike when moved to the cloud. Based on industry evaluation, greater than 50% of organizations have already adopted a cloud-only strategy. This acceleration of digital transformation has major implications for legacy software applications. 

Thankfully, for a lot of corporations, migrating legacy apps to the cloud straight away may now be unnecessary. Moving to the cloud is the short-term solution for added security and performance. It opens the flexibility to refactor or modify in a more moderen, more robust, and resilient environment.

In case your organization counts legacy applications as critical to your workflows and business initiatives, then it’s imperative that you simply plan for the long run.

• How do you get essentially the most out of prior investments? 
• What are the perfect ways to maintain applications secure? 
• By what means are you able to optimize and recognize the performance advantages of the cloud without forsaking critical applications?

On this post, we are going to dive deep into cloud migration for legacy systems and explore the paths available to you.

Data centers and cloud computing have been around for a very long time. VMware introduced VMware vSphere back in 2006. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was founded as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in 2006. Microsoft Azure was first released as a public IaaS provider in 2010.

VMware is the oldest of those three “big name” infrastructure providers.

In actual fact, VMware began releasing cloud-ready versions of its software two years before AWS. The corporate released a cloud-ready version of vSphere back in 2009, supporting AWS APIs to provision and manage capability across local, private data centers and public clouds like Amazon EC2. 

VMware was ahead of the pack with a transparent vision for a way their software and virtualization could work across multiple clouds. 

As more corporations deploy their next-gen apps to the cloud, they’re left wondering how long it’ll take to modernize their legacy applications or whether or not they should start from scratch and construct a brand new app completely from the bottom up. 

1. Rewrite the app entirely?
2. Explore a legacy to cloud migration?

These two options often come all the way down to what most closely fits each business. Modernizing applications will be faster and require fewer resources. Alternatively, one challenge with moving applications to the cloud is ensuring that each one critical data is transferred easily to the brand new system.

At the identical time, it will be significant to contemplate all that goes into modernizing an application by constructing it from the primary line of code:

• Redevelop: Keep in mind the time required for redevelopment, including testing and deployment.
• Refactor: Consider the projected time to modernize with current application development tools available in public cloud providers like Azure or AWS Cloud.
• Rehost: Take into consideration an alternate projected timeline to modernize the applying inside a personal cloud equivalent to VMware Private Cloud at Liquid Web.

 Keep these questions in mind, when planning your legacy application migration to the cloud:

• How well is your application designed? 
• Is your application still relevant? 
• Will there be any issues with latency, bandwidth, and security when moving your app to the cloud? 
• When you are using or have built applications specific to 1 environment, will application performance scale properly across different data centers? 
• What specific tools can be found for monitoring and managing your app on this recent environment?
• Is the timing right for modernizing your applications? If not, does migrating now and refactoring later make sense?

With today’s technology, you now not have to choose between moving forward with recent software or staying behind with outdated software that can’t sustain with business demands. In certain situations, updating legacy software could also be counterproductive. 

For instance, complex integrations or dependencies on other systems are good reasons to pause application updates. Moreover, there are some cases where an application is performing optimally already, and refactoring or rebuilding just doesn’t make sense.

VMware allows businesses to revisit their current infrastructure and know they’re making the best decision for all future needs by providing one platform that will be used across each old and recent systems, including legacy apps built on web-scale infrastructures. Simplicity, security, and reliability are only a number of reasons why corporations select VMware. 

With a software-defined data center (SDDC) platform, you will have the ability to evaluate all of your current and future needs in a single place. This may help increase developer productivity and reduce time spent on debugging issues that might arise throughout the cloud migration process.

Although migrating legacy applications to the cloud offers businesses several significant advantages, the method will be an uphill climb. Many company managers and executives are reluctant to migrate due to the sheer workload it involves. 

Some corporations proceed to straddle the fence and never pull the trigger on a migration because their current system is working – they adopt an if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it mentality. While there are some cases when sticking to legacy applications is the higher option, lots of these organizations seem “stuck within the mud” and afraid of the unknown of change.

Let’s take an in-depth take a look at the professionals and cons of cloud migration. When you’re on the fence about migrating your legacy applications, this will likely be what launches your organization’s IT assets into the long run.

Once you select migrating legacy applications to the cloud is the perfect move for your small business, it’s time to decide on how. There are a number of different methods, each with different features. We’ll walk you thru them below so you’ll be able to make essentially the most intelligent decision to your organization. 

Refactoring is the strategy of rebuilding and fine-tuning legacy applications for performance on the cloud. It is advisable ensure that refactoring is the best selection for your small business before embarking on this path. The refactoring process requires investing a good period of time and resources and may additionally require significant coding changes. 

IT teams also need to recollect to update any relationships with other apps. Usually, legacy applications connect with several different apps across a corporation’s IT infrastructure. If all of those integrations aren’t updated, your team may lose the functionality of key software applications.

While it takes a while, refactoring is ultimately essentially the most sustainable approach to cloud migration. Nevertheless, the one downside is the price. Refactoring requires an investment of money and time because it’s essentially a whole rebuild of a legacy application.

For the reason that process is so complex, it could require hiring an external migration specialist. But the price shall be value it in the long term.

If your organization is seeking to migrate quickly, the lift and shift method could also be for you. This method is often the fastest and easiest technique to migrate legacy applications to the cloud. 

Lift and shift doesn’t require recent coding or architecting within the cloud environment since it uses an application’s original infrastructure. The one thing that changes is the hardware and the applying’s recent cloud environment. 

Using this method has one particular downside since legacy applications come from an on-premises environment. For this reason fact, legacy applications are comfortable processing a selected level of workload. 

The appliance’s potential workload can change once you perform an on-premises-to-cloud migration. This creates issues in relation to the management and scalability of the applying itself. When you don’t foresee any issues with workload balancing and control, then lift and shift is an incredible technique to get your cloud environment up and running quickly and simply.

For anyone seeking to migrate legacy applications to the cloud, replatforming is an excellent compromise between the speed of lift and shift and the steadiness of refactoring. The method involves making small, easy changes to an application’s architecture to organize it to be used within the cloud. An example could be modifying the way in which a specific application communicates with databases so it could reap the benefits of serverless databases within the cloud.

During replatforming, the client side of the applications often doesn’t change. This implies corporations can transition to the cloud without affecting their customer base. It’s a much faster process than refactoring and is often the primary a part of modernizing an organization’s legacy applications.

Issues may arise on the fly throughout the replatforming process. So long as your IT team is aware and adaptable, though, replatforming is usually a invaluable option. 

Migrating legacy applications to the cloud is an enormous undertaking. Technicians might imagine they’re taking all the best steps, but failure remains to be possible. Listed here are some cloud migration best practices to attenuate your risk of loss, help your cloud migration go as easily as possible, and avoid any ISV migration challenges.

You and your team should assess the professionals and cons of moving to the cloud. You could find it’s not definitely worth the upheaval of company processes, but you won’t know until you objectively take a look at the way you’re currently using your legacy applications.

Using a SWOT evaluation for this process is useful since it covers greater than just the technical elements of the migration. Overall costs, mandatory worker training, compliance, and security measures are all considered. This bird’s eye view will show you how to strengthen your planning process and spot any loopholes your team must be wary of.

Before starting your migration, you could evaluate your current IT environment. Fortunately, there are tools to assist with this process. Microsoft provides IT techs with its Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit. This toolkit covers the next:

• Capability
• Network architecture
• Performance requirements
• Infrastructure
• Availability
• Resilience requirements

Use this tool to review and document your current procedures in each area. You’ll also have the ability to leverage the MAP toolkit to uncover any recent maintenance procedures you’ll need in your recent cloud environment.

What’s most vital to your team? Do you desire to get the cloud up and running quickly, or is your focus more on stability? Perhaps you wish a migration method that’s more middle-of-the-road. Regardless, you might want to assess your team’s individual needs and choose which considered one of the above methods is best. 

It’s an excellent idea to run a test or pilot migration before you start the actual process. This lets you test the migration in a protected simulation environment that closely resembles the actual conditions where your migration will happen. 

While running a pilot migration may take time, that’s really your only investment at this point. It’s a protected, low-risk environment for users to check the applications as they’d use them in an actual environment and work out any kinks or bugs. So long as time is just not a difficulty, it’s a worthwhile investment to flesh out any problems prior to the live migration.

VMware’s entire purpose is to let you run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single server or across multiple servers using virtualization. Since coming to market, VMware has optimized its stack for cloud infrastructure. VMware has all the time been about having lower infrastructure costs by bringing a greater density of VMs per host. 

VMware naturally brought the identical profit when transitioning from physical servers to hypervisors running in a VMware-supported cloud.

It is crucial to notice that legacy code does must be updated, rearchitected, or refactored sooner or later to realize the complete advantages of the cloud. With VMware Private Cloud, organizations can move these applications to the cloud to begin updating and modernizing the code without fear of information breaches or physical hardware failure. 

VMware Private Cloud empowers IT to supply a platform for application modernization and expansion to the cloud while allowing businesses to plan higher on modernizing legacy applications.

VMware Private Cloud supports application modernization by providing VMware-aware virtual machines. VMware-aware VMs make running applications and workloads within the cloud easy, even for complex deployments. Legacy applications and old code bases which may otherwise struggle in AWS or Azure can discover a home within the cloud with VMware. And in that home, they will be updated responsibly and be set for growth in the long run.

It is vital for IT to support digital transformation while maintaining legacy systems. VMware Private Cloud with Liquid Web may help VMware customers with migrating legacy applications to the cloud without having to re-architect or rewrite code for legacy applications.

VMware Private Cloud provides an economical alternative for application modernization compared to other cloud solutions equivalent to Azure or AWS. The addition of VMware Private Cloud gives these organizations a brand new option for moving or expanding a wide selection of applications, including their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, into the cloud. As well as, these teams can reap the benefits of other cloud management tools that help improve processes and operations.

VMware essentially serves because the glue that mixes older applications with the cloud. While applications hosted on physical hardware would require a knowledge migration, the trail to the cloud is made easier with VMware. Most public cloud deployments have inflexible requirements for a way code is developed, deployed, and run. VMware supports code that was built for various infrastructures – and at a distinct time.

It is vital for IT to support digital transformation while maintaining legacy systems, and VMware Private Cloud with Liquid Web allows businesses to proceed using legacy applications without refactoring them straight away. Organizations can immediately leverage some advantages of the cloud while forming a modernization plan for when the time is true.