To stay relevant in this digital era, your applications must perform faster and handle all your needs. Existing technologies will become obsolete if they don’t start addressing more complex processes with ease and support new technology integrations. That being said, a cloud based solution can help organizations to meet this goal by modernizing and migrating to cloud.
Migrations can become a complex activity if it doesn’t achieve business objectives and delivers the intended outcome. Hence, it is crucial to take a pragmatic approach while understanding your applications and how well your technical team can adapt with changes. Depending upon your approach, a simple migration could be used across all business units or a hybrid solution to match your needs can be employed.
1. Minimal Alteration
Wherein, your code or orchestration layers are altered in the least ways possible. However, for the objective of getting advantage of the modern cloud technology, this requires minor improvements to the code. For companies that want to remain flexible in the cloud while gaining advantages such as improved system performance, this is a successful strategy.
The catch with alteration is that, if not well thought through, the project scope will shift and become a full refractor. Scope control and the avoidance of unnecessary modifications are crucial to mitigating this risk in such approach.
2. Full Reboot
If in case you want to concentrate more on your technology and stop altering too much of your applications' code, design or features, then "Reboot" is a good choice to consider, wherein you’ll simply rehost your applications. The purpose of it is to enjoy the Capital exp to Operating exp and other advantages of Cloud IaaS quickly.
This would result in significant cost savings of capital expenses. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that your apps are locally running and processing data wherein only the finalized reports/data are stored in the Cloud, which results in not benefitting to the full extent from Cloud.
3. Rebuild
Rebuilding requires the programme being redeployed or reorchestrated using native cloud functions. A rebuild programme not only collects data from cloud storage for analysis, but also performs its analytics and simulations within the Cloud. Companies who take this approach will reuse existing code and frameworks, but will run their applications with the vendor providing Platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Usually, this is prompted by a clear business need to incorporate features, volume, or efficiency that otherwise would be difficult to accomplish in the current configuration of the application. It is a complicated and resource-intensive process, but in the long term, it is the most consistent with future versions.
4. Switchover
Switchover implies moving to another product or in simpler terms, organizations can opt to completely remove their legacy applications and switch to third-party vendors providing ready-built Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. While this approach is cost-effective, less customization is offered by commercial products and may cause a change in business processes altogether.
5. Withhold
In this approach, Withhold actually means doing nothing for the time being and revisiting it later. In some particular cases, if you are unable to retrieve data from premises due to compliance purposes or are not prepared to prioritize on a system that has recently been updated, then when you resolve the obstacles or when the necessary compliance mandates have been acquired, you can revisit cloud migration a solution.
6. Partial POC
Another way of proceeding further could be in availing a partial Proof of Concept, wherein the vendor can give you a simulated environment for trial which works for the applications that your organization has in place. In this scenario, you’ll be able to hold a partial proof that your applications will continue to run smoothly when hosted in Cloud environment prior to moving your productions systems.
7. Retreat
In some cases, where your application is completely phased out, you aren't left with many options that take less investment time. Your existing environment might not cope with Cloud feasibility assessment and you need to take a call to retreat it and possibly opt for SaaS-based application solutions.
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