A legacy system, for the most part, is outdated computing software and/or hardware that is still in use. These systems still meet the need for which they were originally designed for, but they rarely allow for exponential scaling in terms of usage and functionality. With the technological advances happening right now, businesses find it difficult to hire employees who can operate legacy systems as it requires specific skill sets which are often outdated. Additionally, it can be difficult to automate processes and innovate when using legacy systems.
As long as the legacy systems continue to serve their purpose, businesses using them may not find the necessity to change or replace them. Utilising outdated legacy systems, however, presents a number of challenges that aren’t immediately apparent. Statistics suggest that businesses that still rely on legacy systems spend about 60-80% of their IT budgets to keep them running. Additionally, these systems are also more prone to vulnerability attacks, take more time and money to develop, and do not integrate well with newer technologies.
Keeping legacy systems running not only costs businesses more money, but they also contribute to dissatisfied employers and customers, poor brand reputation, and a lack of innovation. Businesses need to understand the limitations and negative impacts of legacy systems and consider application modernisation by moving them to the cloud.
Welcome to the cloud
The technological building block of any business is its digital workload or assets–involving servers, storage, networking–all utilising your data to do something meaningful. A datacenter is a dedicated space where digital assets and workloads are stored. Datacenters can be owned by a company or they can be managed by a third party. The former is known as an ‘on-premise’ datacenter, while the latter is known as public cloud.
In simple terms, running your business logic on the cloud means utilising a third-party digital workload to run your business logic.
The advantages of cloud-based systems over legacy systems are numerous.
Elasticity and Scalability
Unlike traditional datacenters, the cloud allows you to scale workloads quickly, cost-effectively, and reliably. As a result, you can meet demand quickly.
Cost saving
Keeping legacy systems running requires a lot of maintenance. Cloud computing is cost-effective when migrations and requirements are well-planned and defined. By scaling based on demand, you can minimise idle server resources, which means one only has to pay for what they use, i.e., a move to an Operational Expenditure (OpEx) model where you are only paying for the operations and don’t require capital expenditure for hardware or datacenter space. A business can also opt into different cost-saving schemes offered by vendors if they seem beneficial.
Less maintenance required.
Cloud service providers also offer serverless or managed workloads. This includes storage, networks, and servers that you do not need to maintain, saving you money and human resources.
Inter-operability
Integrating with and utilising other services provided by the same vendor is easy. AWS, for instance, provides service logs and metrics of the client’s services by default via their logging solution.
What is the process involved in moving your business to the cloud?
Cloud migration must be done iteratively in phases with regular feedback cycles and measurable success metrics reviewed. A cloud consultancy would work with you to identify the best migration strategy for your business factoring in risk, cost, maturity, compliance and security to ensure they make the best choice and see real value from increased control, agility, developer productivity and an improvement in resource utilisation.
Planning
Assessing your current capabilities across people, skill, processes and tools against those required for optimal public cloud adoption by industry.
Migration
Identifying the legacy systems that are in use by clients and plan a strategy to leverage the public cloud by modernising them. This includes re-factoring the applications into cloud-native microservices to re-platforming traditional apps on container platforms.
It’s also advised to look at improving existing cloud architecture by creating well-designed, efficient CI/CD pipelines and isolated environments to convert the technical stack into achieved business goals.
Security and Optimisation
Increase data protection on business cloud infrastructure and applications and comply with industry standards.
To make the most of your cloud infrastructure, generally consultants assist clients in identifying cost reduction opportunities, equip them with optimisation techniques, and assist them in adopting new products and services. In addition, periodically review the success metrics and the progress of the cloud adoption process to ensure it aligns with the business goals of clients.
While moving to the cloud can bring its benefits, it is the responsibility of the business to ensure the security, governance, and resiliency of their services.
As businesses increasingly move to cloud-based models, the need for a reliable cloud computing consultancy has never been greater. A cloud computing consultant can help organisations navigate the often complex world of cloud computing. They can provide advice on everything from cloud provider selection to cloud migrations to optimising cloud deployments. In addition, cloud computing consultants can help organisations to keep their cloud costs under control. A company such as esynergy, has extensive experience in cloud migration projects all the way from planning to successfully executing it and helping businesses achieve their goals.
