5 Strategies for Application Cloud Migration

While there have been numerous literatures on application cloud migration approaches and the different strategies surrounding it, this blog attempts to focus on the decision points of choosing the right strategy for mass application cloud migration.

5 Strategies for Application Cloud Migration

The strategies for application cloud migration can arguably be classified into 5 broad categories (5Rs) as below (considering Retain and Retire as not the part of cloud migration):

• Rehost or Lift & Shift – Migrate an application to cloud by retaining its existing platforms and code
• Replatform – Migrate applications on different operating systems/middleware/databases, etc.
• Refactor – Restructure an application’s composition/ partially rearchitect/ cloud-enable, etc.
• Rewrite/Rearchitect – To cloud-native application
• Replace – With SaaS

Application Assessment for Cloud Migration

For portfolio application cloud migration, a detailed application portfolio assessment may be required to understand each application’s position in the overall landscape.

Below are the few critical parameters for Application Portfolio Assessment for Cloud Migration

• Application Criticality (Lifeblood /Business Supporting/Utility etc.)
• Target users (B2C/B2B/B2E)
• Application Vendor (COTS/Custom Bespoke- Application Source Code Owner)
• Application Technology (Mainframe/ Midrange /Java/.NET/VB/Legacy others etc.)
• Application Type (Desktop/Web/Service Oriented/Message Oriented etc.)
• Application TCO (Infra, Software Licenses, Development & Maintenance Team Cost)
• Application Cloud Readiness (Application Libraries/Frameworks/Components readiness for target Cloud Platform/PaaS)
• Application Dependencies (Internal/External Dependencies/Interfaces)
• Application Integration Points (API/Messaging/User Interface/Database etc.)

Decision Point for Choosing an Application Cloud Migration Strategy

Post the applications’ portfolio assessment, plotting them against a decision tree as below can help in understanding the most appropriate strategy for the application groups where each application can be grouped into various buckets as below

• Rehost/Lift & Shift
• Replatform
• Refactor
• Rewrite/Rearchitect
• Replace

Cloud Migration Approach: Replatforming and Refactoring

Out of the 5 cloud migration strategies mentioned above, replatform and refactoring may require some special attention. In a typical IT portfolio, nearly 50 percent of application TCO may reside in custom applications which may be meeting present and immediate future business needs. They may be cloud-ready but might be on high-cost application platforms including application servers, middleware, and databases. These Tier 2, 3 and 4 applications are generally in bulk. Hence, if these applications can be replatformed to a proven, time-tested, and high-performance yet low cost application platforms, significant TCO saving can result from the replatforming initiative. When such replatformed applications are further migrated to container platforms on cloud and integrated with pay-as-you-go cloud PaaS solutions, not only the application TCO declines drastically, but there is also a significant improvement in application performance, availability, and other benefits of cloud can be achieved truly.

A few of these custom applications that may not be cloud-ready can be refactored to be made cloud-ready and integrated seamlessly with the other applications on cloud and cloud PaaS solutions, thereby reducing the portfolio TCO further and enabling the portfolio applications to reap the real benefits of the cloud ecosystem.

Conclusion

Legacy application migration to cloud requires careful planning and strategy for a successful rollout. The manual process may be too risky for the mass migration of large portfolios of big enterprises. Application replatforming and refactoring may best be done by leveraging automation using any time-tested platform for minimizing the risk of failure and reap the true benefits of cloud migration.

At Hexaware, our application cloud migration “Center of Excellence” continuously analyzes market trends in application cloud migration. After consulting with decision-makers of our large clients and rigorous R&D, we have come up with an enterprise cloud adoption product suite Amaze^TM for Applications. It uses AI, pattern-matching, and automation, and can automate cloud migration of legacy on-premise monolithic applications to cloud-native applications on any cloud for various industry sub-verticals like Banking, Capital Markets, Airlines, P&C, Insurance, etc. It can help to transform business models as well as industry landscapes.

References:

TCO Calculator for Application Cloud Replatforming

Case Study 1:

Oracle to AWS Postgres Migration for a Leading Secondary Mortgage Firm

Case Study 2:

DB2 to AWS Aurora Postgres DB Application Cloud Replatforming for a Leading Data Analytics Firm

For more information, please write to marketing@hexaware.com