As businesses race to innovate, the cloud offers unparalleled growth opportunities. However, migrating without modernizing legacy applications first is like upgrading to a high-speed train while still riding on outdated tracks. The journey may begin, but it won't be smooth or efficient. According to McKinsey, 60% of cloud migrations fail due to insufficient preparation—modernizing legacy systems is the essential first step. In this article, we'll explore why modernization is key to unlocking the true potential of the cloud, ensuring a seamless, secure, and cost-effective migration for long-term success.
The Growing Need for Cloud Adoption
In today’s fast-changing business environment, competitive forces drive businesses to transition to cloud environments rapidly. 91 percent of organizations are adopting some form of cloud, 81 percent are in a multi-cloud state, according to Flexera. Cloud adoption means many things: flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency, and the ability to innovate first. But, that transition often requires migrating cloud-unfriendly and complex, monolithic legacy systems that were designed to cope with on-premise computing.
These legacy applications that run on on-premise servers and are built on outdated technology stacks aren’t really fit to be run on the kind of dynamic, elastic nature of the cloud. However, if organizations have not explicitly modernized these systems first, they may face unintended consequences, including increased operational costs, performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and integration trouble that prevent reaping the maximum benefits of the cloud. All these necessitate the improvement of legacy application migration to cloud.
Look below for eye-opening statistics:
The worldwide public cloud computing market continues to grow and is expected to reach an estimated 675 billion U.S. dollars in 2024.
The Challenges of Migrating Legacy Applications
While legacy applications are essential to a business’s ongoing operations, they may depend on risky legacy technologies that are difficult or impossible to upgrade, modernize, or even keep supported by vendors. When businesses attempt to migrate these systems directly to the cloud without modernization, they may encounter a range of problems:
Compatibility Issues: Physical hardware runs legacy applications, which aren’t built to utilize the scale and flexibility of the cloud. But this generally doesn’t go well, as without modernization, migrating them often turns into compatibility issues that cause performance degradation, frequent downtime, or even total failure.
Security Risks: Many legacy applications were developed long before these newer cybersecurity threats were even fully accepted. This means they lack the built-in security features to protect sensitive data in cloud environments, enabling businesses to get breached, have data leaks, and not meet industry standards.
Escalated Costs: Migrating legacy systems to the cloud without modernizing them beforehand can result in inefficient resource utilization, significantly increasing operational expenses. Traditional applications often demand extensive cloud resources to function optimally, which undermines the cost-saving advantages that cloud adoption typically offers.
Lack of Agility: Legacy applications are more or less rigid and inflexible. If you migrate them directly to the cloud without modernizing them, businesses will not get the full benefit of agility and the cloud’s ability to spin up resources in response to changing business needs.
The Benefits of Modernizing Legacy Applications Before Migration
In order to migrate legacy applications to the cloud, they can be modernized, and in doing so, there are strategic benefits that this will afford, such as better performance, better and more secure code, and a better migration path. Here are some of the key advantages:
1. Optimized Performance and Scalability
Modernized applications are built with cloud-native technologies in mind, allowing them to fully take advantage of the cloud’s performance and scalability capabilities. By refactoring or re-architecting legacy applications, businesses can ensure that their systems are optimized for the cloud, allowing for faster processing speeds, reduced latency, and the ability to scale up or down as needed.
2. Enhanced Security
Modernization presents an opportunity to strengthen the security of legacy systems by integrating advanced protection measures. Cloud-native architectures provide comprehensive security features such as automated patching, encryption, and access controls, safeguarding sensitive data against potential cyber threats. By upgrading legacy applications before migration, businesses can mitigate the security risks often associated with outdated systems.
3. Cost Efficiency
Although modernization often involves an upfront investment, it usually results in substantial long-term cost savings. Modern applications are designed to be more resource-efficient, utilizing fewer cloud resources and thereby lowering infrastructure expenses. Furthermore, optimizing applications for the cloud reduces the recurring costs tied to maintaining outdated legacy systems, making modernization a cost-effective strategy over time.
4. Increased Agility and Innovation
A modernized, cloud-native application empowers businesses to become more agile and responsive to change. By leveraging a contemporary architecture, organizations can streamline updates, roll out new features more efficiently, and seamlessly integrate with other cloud-based services. This fosters innovation and provides a significant competitive advantage within their industry.
How to Approach Legacy Application Modernization
The first step is to analyze the application's current state, identify areas of technical debt, and determine which components need updating. This often involves adopting strategies like replatforming, refactoring, or rebuilding applications using cloud-native technologies such as microservices and containers.
The next step is to prioritize applications for modernization, focusing on those that offer the highest return on investment (ROI) once migrated to the cloud. This typically includes mission-critical applications or those that would greatly benefit from the cloud’s scalability and flexibility.
Lastly, collaborating with cloud specialists or service providers is essential to facilitate a seamless and efficient modernization and migration process, ensuring expert guidance every step of the way.
Conclusion
As we’ve explored, modernization is needed today. An expert cloud migration consultant can support you throughout the migration process. Such experts and professional cloud consulting services can help you bridge the gap between your current and future IT infrastructure.
Happy Clouding!