Steps to successful legacy application migration

Cloud migration can pose a significant challenge, but recognizing potential risks and obstacles in the beginning, along with careful planning, helps you manage them. Here we describe the steps to successful application migration:

Step 1. Set goals and define a cloud migration strategy. Planning a strategy helps to find out the best way to implement the cloud migration into your business. You should have a clear understanding why to migrate legacy systems, its applications or some component to the cloud. Determine and analyze business goals and objectives, and how your company can benefit from the cloud migration project. Think as well about performance, timeframe, and cost goals for understanding the concrete numbers to aim towards.

Step 2. Define components for migration. It is important to assess your environment and determine the factors that will define the migration, such as critical application data, legacy data, and application compatibility. As we have mentioned, some app components are perfect for cloud migration, the others are not. You should identify which data needs to be migrated and when, and whether you need encryption of the data, which could be an additional challenge.

Step 3. Choose the right provider of cloud computing services. The right tech stack contributes to building a reliable and efficient product and the choice of the best-suited cloud provider should be based on your business needs and product specifics. All cloud providers, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, offer various cloud computing services required for any basic business. The difference occurs in a number of regions and availability zones where they are hosting, the number of services they are providing, their customer-friendly pricing models and discount models, as well as their integration with open-source and on-premise systems, such as MS tools.

Step 4. Evaluate the company’s possibilities. Once the business requirement has been determined, the relevant services offered by cloud providers and their costs understood, it's time to define the possibility of migration by its own workforce. Sometimes it's hard for companies to find the talent or upskill existing staff to manage the new technology and maximize its value. This can lead to additional unexpected costs and time delays to realize the full return on the modernization investment. And here a better solution would be to find an outsourced company with an expertise in legacy application migration.

Step 5. Implementing the migration. The major challenge here is carrying out your migration with minimal disruption to normal operation, at the lowest cost, and over the shortest period. If your data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, you risk affecting your business operations. You’ll also need to synchronize changes that are made to the source data while the migration is ongoing. AWS provider, for example, has such built-in tools during AWS cloud migration. Every workload element individually migrated should be proven to work in the new environment before another element migration.

Step 6. Evaluate migration success. The final step of the process is to analyze whether your cloud system is working according to your expectations. Test for minimal downtime, data integrity, ensure that no data is lost, and check your applications are fully functional. In case of any difficulties or problems with the functionality, you can contact your cloud service provider to get the issue resolved as soon as possible.

Final thoughts

Cloud adoption enables keeping up with the present-day technologies, better management and protection of sensitive data. Despite the migration process being a complex, risky and time-consuming process, requiring significant investment in time, tools, and resources, the results are worthwhile for long-term success. In case of inability to do it on their own, because of lack of experience or insufficient IT-department, companies should consider attracting an outsourced cloud migration partner to assist with the task. At Twelvedevs, we support you throughout the migration lifecycle, from your current system analysis to implementation and support.