It’s easy to see why executives are increasingly considering moving selected business applications to the cloud. Three issues drive the argument: agility, focus and cost. With global competition making it tougher to stand out, constant application changes are required. Rather than having to plan, order and install new hardware, then test every application change, the interface in the cloud is faster and simpler. Instead of buying more hardware and going through the same process every time demand grows, you simply add what you need instantly. Agility is solved.
Many companies have begun to believe that their business is not in managing IT services. Instead, they’d rather bring in talented development teams to give them the edge, leaving systems management to an outside agency. Cloud allows a company to focus on what’s important. Finally, the cost is often much lower than running your own datacenter. And to only purchase what you need, when you need it, is a huge advantage especially to companies who have slim profit margins.
That explains why management is coming to you asking you to move those legacy applications to the cloud. But can you? Not every application is suited to the cloud; design compromises that have been made over the years and other kinds of technical debt may make it impossible to move the application as is. For example, imagine an application with heavy I/O; when the disk is right there, having a large I/O per transaction rate may be tolerable. When you move to the cloud, you may not have the co-location needed to keep response times acceptable.
In other cases, the components have a lot of dependencies, meaning they can’t be distributed across multiple virtual machines. As this is one way cloud companies manage complex workloads, you have to be able to work with their designs, even as you don’t know the details of how they deliver your service.
Though legacy applications make up the majority of critical business applications for most large companies, these are the very applications that might have issues in moving to the cloud. Over the years, they have been modified, enhanced, connected to other applications and a variety of other changes, introducing technical debt and other problems to the code. Rarely are they machine-independent, a requirement for most cloud providers.
What can you do? For many years, the accepted wisdom was that you had to rewrite the application in modern languages to run on modern platforms or to buy applications that perform essentially the same functions. Both are costly, time-consuming and introduce a great deal of risk into your business. For many, neither option is viable. But what if you could fix the problems in your existing applications without a complete rewrite? What if by doing this, you could not only move applications to the cloud, but easily web and mobile-enable them? You might even with to introduce the concepts of intelligent BPM to these older applications, gaining analytics, agility and performance. But how?
CM First offers a variety of modernization methodologies designed to your specific needs. These include products, solutions and services that can minimize technical debt, web and mobile-enable older applications and even help you move to BPM. You don’t lose control over your applications and you can continue to develop them much as you do now. Developers don’t need to learn a completely new skill set. And because it works with your existing code, the risk is substantially lower.
Learn about the solutions offered here:
Future-proofing CA 2E applications: http://www.cmfirstgroup.com/initiatives/ca-2e-to-ca-plex/
Enable web and mobile technologies: http://www.cmfirstgroup.com/initiatives/mobile-application-enablement/
Move to iBPM: http://www.cmfirstgroup.com/products/axonivybpm/
Wherever you are on your ‘cloud’ journey, make sure you check in with CM First to ensure that you have the modernization needed to enable you to move successfully to the cloud.
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