What Is Legacy Application Migration?
The process to migrate legacy applications involves moving legacy software from one platform to a new, secure system. This procedure involves a dedicated, skilled team of experts who can
successfully migrate legacy systems and their associated data. Did you know? According to reports, legacy application migration market will see a surge from $11.4 billion in 2020 to $24.8 billion by 2025 at the CACR of 16.8%.
Migrating legacy applications to the cloud or another modern platform will not only enhance the business’s efficiency by providing scalability, streamlining the infrastructure process, and flexibility, but it will also prevent hardware failure risks,
downtime challenges, and manage the overall security posture. Finally, it will improve user experience, revenue, and productivity.
What are the Benefits of Migrating Legacy Applications?
Here are the top reasons to migrate legacy applications:
Elevated System Performance
Aging legacy apps slow down productivity and contribute to hardware failure and data loss. The approach to migrate legacy IT infrastructure will not only extend the life of aging systems and applications but also enable them to leverage modern technologies that can help them boost their performance, efficiency, and scalability, which will improve overall productivity.
Robust Security Posture
The approach to migrating legacy applications has a significant advantage, which is improved overall security posture. With time, any software’s previous version becomes vulnerable to security risks, making it necessary to migrate it to a modern system that is well-equipped with security protocols.
The modern security measures are updated with the latest industry guidelines and standards. Integrating them into the business will not only enhance the security infrastructure but also make them compliant with the industry guidelines and standards preventing penalties and fines.
Minimized Operating Costs
Another advantage of legacy application migration is minimized operational costs. Migrating legacy applications to the cloud-based framework reduces hardware and IT support costs while maintaining the on-premises solution. Also, various cloud providers like
Microsoft Azure and
AWS (Amazon Web Services) offer different scalable options for businesses that can help them save money by only paying for the needed services.
Enhanced Customer Experience
Transitioning from legacy solutions to the cloud enhances the customer experience by making it more efficient, adaptable to contemporary needs, and user-friendly. It also improves performance, accessibility to intuitive interfaces, and reliability by streamlining the workflow, making it easier to navigate.
Why Moving Legacy Apps to the Cloud Gaining Popularity?
The question now arises as to why there is a
need for legacy application migration and transition from aging, outdated software to modern platforms. The reason is very simple: legacy systems, which were previously the tech revolution’s crown jewels, are now ticking time bombs. With time, they have become more vulnerable to security risks, costlier to manage, and hinder agility.
The legacy application started lagging down and creating several challenges like downtime, poor performance, efficiency, and productivity issues impacting the revenue. These are warning lights, indicating that they have worked enough and need upgradation. They not only decline performance but often impact the user experience due to more extended loading periods, delayed response times, and increased resource utilization. It indicates that your
legacy system cannot keep up with modern technology and needs transformation. It also results in corruption or loss of data.
With cloud migration, legacy applications gain greater scalability, enabling them to keep up with the demands of modern technology. Moreover, implementing the cloud offers greater flexibility and lower maintenance costs of legacy software, thus making it economically sound for any business trying to stay ahead of its competitors.
What are the Challenges While Migrating Aging Solutions to the Cloud?
Migrating legacy applications to the cloud are gaining popularity as businesses recognize their potential. However, many challenges must be considered when migrating legacy applications. Here are some of the challenges that usually occur while migrating:
Compatibility With Cloud Infrastructure
Legacy applications are mainly designed for on-premises ecosystems and may not be compatible with cloud infrastructure. Therefore, when moving outdated applications to the cloud, it must be ensured that they are compatible with virtualization technologies like virtual machines, containers, and hypervisors.
Also, verifying that all the existing databases and other technical assets are operational in the cloud environment is mandatory. Therefore, strategizing and testing are required before the migration.
Shortage of Skilled Experts
Another challenge businesses may encounter when migrating legacy systems is finding a skilled professional with experience in handling such procedures. Businesses need help finding individuals with the necessary skills to carry out complex tasks. Also, hiring such experienced contractors can add more cost to the migration process.
Operational Expenses
Legacy application migration can be a pretty expensive process, if proper strategy is not implemented. Well, it also depends on how many applications need to be migrated along with some other added costs like:
- Hardware upgrades
- Software licenses
- Staff training on the new tools and processes
There are other additional costs, such as storage and bandwidth usage of cloud vendors and hosting providers.
Customization and Adoption
Now comes the most crucial factor: the duration businesses require to become comfortable with the new process after migrating to the cloud infrastructure. Personnel training and user resistance can escalate the cost and time needed to familiarize everyone with the latest technology.
Stromasys’ Legacy Application Migration Success Story
A leading cement manufacturer from Saudi Arabia faced a critical challenge. Their mission-critical ERP systems used to operate on the legacy Fujitsu SPARC servers. As these systems were outdated, they had no disaster recovery site, which created a single point of failure, threatening business continuity.
Solaris operating system is one of the legacy applications that operated on SPARC hardware. They are not supported by most of the cloud providers. Stromasys partner CloudWRKS deployed Charon-SSP 6.0 on AWS, which enabled complete legacy application migration with business disruption.
With only three months of implementation, they saw remarkable results with zero code changes required.
Key Outcome:
- Active-passive DR setup with 1-hour RTO
- 25% reduction in power consumption
- Performance matching the on-premises servers with only a few resources
- Ensuring business continuity, cost-effectively
- Seamless integration with modern cloud infrastructure
Want to discover how they eliminated their single point of failure?
Read the Full Case Study
How Can Stromasys Help with Legacy Application Migration?
Stromasys is one of the leading legacy hardware virtualization services worldwide. For over two decades, they have assisted hundreds of organizations in simplifying the operations of legacy software. With Stromasys, businesses can choose from cloud providers like AWS, Google, IBM, and VMware according to their needs.
If you are also looking to transform your business and move from your aging and outdated hardware to the cloud, Stromasys can assist you. Its
Charon Emulation Solutions will help in eliminating the constraints of legacy systems and enhance your business’s efficiency, maintaining the security architecture while managing your expenses. If you’re ready to transform your business and unlock the benefits of cloud migration, contact our legacy experts today for expert guidance and support.
Book a Demo
Summary
Migrating legacy systems to the cloud to the cloud is essential for businesses to remain updated with modern technology. By doing so, businesses can reduce operational costs, enhance performance, and elevate security posture. However, it is also challenging, as there are issues like a shortage of skilled personnel, expenses, choosing from the right cloud service providers, and compatibility issues.
Despite such challenges, businesses can navigate their legacy
application migration journey with careful strategies and the proper support.
What Is the Importance of Legacy Application Migration?
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