How Application Migration can Effectively Enhance Your Business

Businesses have learned an indisputable lesson from the pandemic: Investment in the cloud is not optional but a necessity to ensure sustainability, making cloud migration integral for IT optimization.

Clearly, application modernization services like application migration are a viable option for organizations that want to update their software portfolios and have access to the latest infrastructures, tools, languages, and technological advances. Due to this, application migration is an essential component of an enterprise's overall digital transformation strategy.

Application Modernization Services

Application modernization services involve migrating legacy applications or platforms to new applications and integrating new functionalities to enhance business capabilities. Check this out if you want to learn more about application modernization.

Cloud technologies have emerged as an essential tool for enterprises seeking to remain competitive and meet changing customer demands. Migrating applications to the cloud have proven to increase business agility and resiliency through application migration and modernization.

Businesses are now seeking cloud-driven modernization to remain relevant, compete effectively, and improve agility. Enterprises must choose the right modernization strategy based on their specific organization and business goals to succeed with modernization programs.

What is Application Migration?

Applications may be migrated from on-premises technology solution to cloud infrastructures, such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, or Microsoft Azure. It can also refer to moving applications from a private to a public cloud.

During this process, there may be several hurdles to overcome. Existing applications are often designed to run on specific operating systems or cloud platforms, which can complicate migration. There are a number of things you must consider before moving forward with application migration.

Among these factors will be budgetary considerations, security, and compliance. You'll need to take into account the technical requirement and dependency of each application since these factors can significantly impact your migration project. Choosing the right cloud provider is important, but it's not the only factor to consider.

Types of Application Migration Services

Based on the nature of computing environments, there are four types of application migrations:

• Between cloud environments,
• Between data centers,
• From a public cloud to a private/hybrid cloud,
• From an on-premises data center to a cloud.

6 R’s of Application Migration:

Application migration to the cloud is possible in different ways, and each approach serves a different purpose. Gartner Inc. identified five ways to migrate applications to the cloud, and Stephen Orban expanded on this concept in 6 strategies for application migration to the cloud.

Rehosting

The approach is often referred to as "lift and shift." In other words, you deploy your existing application to an IaaS environment. When an organization is looking to scale its legacy migration quickly, this approach is often taken.

Replatforming

"Replatforming" involves upgrading an application from its existing platform to a cloud-based platform while preserving its functionality. To avoid high costs, you also need to ensure that the application is designed for optimal resource utilization in the cloud.

Repurchasing

The simplest, fastest, and least risky method of running cloud applications is repurchasing (also known as "drop and shop"). Moving to a new product could mean ending licensing and repurposing services on a new platform or service.

Refactoring / Re-architecting

Cloud refactoring involves moving applications to cloud infrastructure while re-architecting them to fit the cloud environment better. An example of this would be moving from a monolithic to a serverless architecture. This strategy would enhance scalability, agility, and overall performance.

Retire

Identifying assets and services that can be retired enable the business to devote resources to high-value, widely used services. In too many cases, people overlook, ignore, or do nothing about unused parts of their IT portfolios.

Retain

Retain means that you do not migrate the application due to a lack of vital information or other obstacles. Migration only makes sense when it is necessary. However, you want to retain them for now and revisit them later.

The 3 stages of Application Migration:

There are generally three stages in the application migration planning process. Consider each option carefully, and be prepared to retain some on-premises workloads if necessary.

Application identification and assessment

You should begin this discovery phase by ensuring that you have a comprehensive catalog of all applications in your portfolio. The following characteristics should be taken into account when evaluating each application's value:

• Impact on the business
• Ability to fulfill crucial business needs
• Timeliness and importance of data
• Size, complexity, and manageability
• Cost of maintenance and development
• Increased value from migration to the cloud

If you're thinking of migrating applications, you'll need to perform a cloud affinity assessment. Furthermore, application dependency discovery tools can assist you in determining whether migrating a workload outside its current environment is feasible.

The total cost of ownership assessment

It can be challenging to determine the total cost of a cloud migration project. Compare scenarios associated with keeping applications and infrastructure on-premises with those associated with moving them to the cloud. In either case, you'll have to calculate the cost of purchasing, operating, and maintaining the hardware you will keep on-premises, as well as the licensing fees for the software you will need.

Compare your cloud provider's monthly bill in both scenarios, as well as the migration costs, including testing the new infrastructure and training employees. Be sure to consider maintenance costs for on-premises legacy applications.

Assess overall risk and project duration

The final phase of migration planning involves establishing a timeline for your project and identifying any stumbling blocks that could delay it.

Legacy application migration to the cloud

Cloud migration is generally more challenging for older applications. Assess legacy applications thoroughly before migrating them.

Conclusion

Application migration is a highly effective way to modernize and streamline the way your business operates, resulting in substantial cost savings and productivity improvements for your clients and customers. Every application migration is unique, and every company moving to this newer technology will be different as well. Hope that this post will help readers gain a better understanding of application migration processes. We at Digiligo can simplify this application migration planning process. Discover how our solutions can help you transform your enterprise.