ArticlesThe cloud migration market is expected to grow to $806.41 billion by 2029. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the traditional data center or cloud.
The data above clearly reflects the potential of cloud migration. This is a very good chance for businesses that rely heavily on legacy systems to move towards creating an IT environment that is reliable as well as efficient.
Migrating legacy systems to the cloud is advantageous as it reduces risk and cost of keeping aging infrastructure. At the same time, businesses can leverage scalability, reliability and advanced features of modern cloud platforms.
So, if you are a key decision-maker in an established organization still working form on-premises legacy systems for critical functions – the choice is clear: migrating your legacy system to the cloud could be a move worth making.
At its core, the migrating legacy systems to the cloud is defined as a process of moving data, applications and OS from on-premises computing infrastructure and hardware to the cloud. It helps companies exponentially increase data distribution, scalability, agility and cost efficiency.
Let’s explain this with an example: our client Professional Target Marketing (PTM) is a marketing agency specializing in the pharmaceutical industry. Their database was mission-critical for their business. And this is why they wanted to make sure that their OpenVMS OS ran flawlessly. Unfortunately, that hardware was inconsistent and prone to failure. With Stromasys, they migrated their legacy applications to Oracle, eliminating risks and reducing costs significantly.
Beyond the financial rewards or increased efficiency in handling your critical processes, moving legacy systems to the cloud can be a catalyst for transformation.
The biggest advantage of migrating legacy systems to cloud is that organizations aren’t tied to physical hardware and can run their most important applications reliably (on modern cloud environment). So, they better save those nightmares of system failures and downtime.
Performance is another alarming challenge with legacy systems. By migrating to the cloud, users may see a significant performance boost with fast data processing speeds.
With strategies like lift and shift, you can migrate your legacy applications to the cloud without disrupting your current systems and processes.
Migrating legacy systems to cloud saves you from buying physical hardware and keeping expensive on-premises infrastructure. This means businesses like you can reallocate their IT budgets towards other strategic initiatives.
Migrating legacy systems to cloud lets the cloud provider handle system updates and maintenance and also security. This takes the load away from internal IT teams and saves on the need for expanding headcount.
Legacy systems running on-premises platforms frequently consume a lot more energy. Moving legacy workloads to the Cloud massively helps to save energy and lowers electricity bills.
The cloud-based scaling of the workloads means that you can hit levels of service which are far above the current standards. From the operations side, they no longer need to patch old hardware.
Migrating legacy systems to cloud undergoes 5 phases: assessment, planning, preparation, migration, and post-migration. For a successful migration, decision makers must prepare themselves for the 5 Phases of Legacy System Migration to Cloud.
During the entire process, there are three aspects that require your utmost attention:
Does your business depend on the legacy application for executing mission-critical workloads? Do you want to move your legacy workloads to the cloud without changing anything and pay significantly less as compared to maintaining the aging systems?
If yes, then lift and shift should be the right strategy for you because strategies like refactoring, repurchasing, replatforming, and retiring are costly, time-consuming and can be disruptive.
If yes, then lift and shift should be the right strategy for you because strategies like refactoring, repurchasing, replatforming, and retiring are costly, time-consuming and can be disruptive. With lift and shift you can enjoy the best of both the worlds – keeping your familial application and improving the performance at the same time.
Be it a compliance risk or migration risk, you should assess them beforehand. This is where a reputed legacy migration partner comes into place who can help you address all the potential challenges throughout the journey.
Also, make sure that you communicate clearly with the stakeholders so that they are aware of the entire process, potential risk and the expected outcomes.
Take the guesswork out of the picture. Let’s see what the common mistakes organizations often make while migrating legacy systems to cloud.
Not Knowing what to achieve: Why are you migrating your legacy workloads to cloud? What do you want to achieve from it? Organizations have to evaluate their present IT setup if they want clarity.
Selecting the wrong strategy: If your legacy applications are critical to the business, it’s not always a great move to change the entire applications. So, don’t always run after popular choices, there can be a middle-of-the-roads strategy as well.
Ignoring User Experience: Neglecting the user experience during migration may lead to dissatisfaction and decreased productivity. This is also a reason why you should choose a modernization strategy that doesn’t need much alteration.
Overlooking Security and Compliance: If you wish to stay away from data breaches, you must first not neglect compliance concerns. Otherwise, it will lead to data breaches.
Migrating legacy systems to cloud is an effortless task with Stromasys. The deployment can be successfully completed in a matter of days. This means that the migration can be executed seamlessly without disrupting business operations.
Charon by Stromasys operates on the fundamentals of lift and shift migration. It emulates legacy hardware (HP 3000 or 9000, DEC VAX and Alpha, PDP, and Sun SPARC) on modern x86 systems. It allows legacy applications to be migrated from old hardware that is beyond its end of life, to an emulated version of the old hardware on any cloud system, such as AWS, Oracle, Azure, or IBM.
The business value and TCO (total cost of ownership) are impressive. As there are no modifications to the existing applications, there are no repercussions for moving applications to the cloud. Companies do not have to bear any overhead costs. Additionally, it swiftly addresses a source of technical debt that has proven difficult to resolve.
Furthermore, it allows IT to execute infrastructure strategies throughout the entire IT estate without exception. Ultimately, it enables the establishment of a unified and coherent physical infrastructure within the data center, free from irregularities. Would you like to know more about Charon solutions?
1. What is an example of a legacy system?
An example of legacy system can be a power plant running their Solaris applications on SPARC hardware.
2. How to migrate legacy applications to Azure cloud?
Migrating legacy systems to azure cloud requires choosing the right strategy (for example, lift and shift, selecting the service provider (for example, Stromasys) and having a detailed pre-migration & post-migration plan ready.
3. What Is the Main Drawback of Legacy Systems?
The major drawback with the legacy system is that they are outdated. The hardware is unreliable, and prone to failure. Eliminating the hardware can extend the lifespan of the legacy application and aids business continuity.
4. What is legacy data migration?
Legacy data migration is the process of moving the existing data from legacy software or hardware to a modern infrastructure, either on-premises or on-cloud.
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