5 Tips for Transferring Legacy Apps to the Cloud

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, legacy apps are driving toward an impending demise, and transferring legacy apps is becoming a must. Gartner forecasts that the worldwide public cloud revenue will grow 21.4 % in 2018 to a total of $186.4 billion, up from $153.5 billion in 2017. These staggering numbers are mainly due to the companies that take advantage of the unbeatable benefits that PaaS, SaaS or IaaS provide on a regular basis for businesses in this crazy world of change.

You may not be fully aware of this yet, but the time will come when your system starts playing tricks on you and you will have to transfer your business to a cloud platform. Are you ready for transferring legacy apps?

As a company that specializes in cloud consulting, we have led many cloud platform implementation projects from start to finish. Most of them involved migrating data and supporting client teams throughout the entire process. We know how important it is to understand what comes along with such change and how to prepare for it in advance.

Choose the Right Platform

When shopping for the right solution, keep in mind that there are fake cloud providers that only claim to be „cloud”. This phenomenon is so common that it has its own name: „cloud-washing”. It stands for adding the „cloud” part to a product mainly for marketing reasons. Always make sure to carefully examine the product and see if it really supports cloud computing. Going for a fake provider can backfire and result in:

• Delayed and
  painful product upgrades,
• Expensive integrations,
• A lot of unplanned downtime,
• Poor security.

At Grape Up, we perform migrations to the Cloud Foundry platform, an open source, multi cloud application PaaS.

Motivate and Engage Your Team

Not 100% of your team members will be super enthusiastic about the change at first. Most of them can perceive it as a challenge of learning a new tool or even fear dropping behind the new technology. Which is why it is crucial to assure them that proper support and traning will be there for them. A good idea is to involve managers to speak with their teams ahead of time. An alternative to this would be to delegate staff members to be project managers during the migration.

Prepare for Deployment

There are companies out there that delay the date of going live out of pure fear of doing it. The system might be ready, and so can be 90% of staff, but still. There will always be someone who won’t feel at ease about the change. Keep in mind that it’s a much better idea to go live even if you’re not fully ready than put it off for another month or two.

Teach, Explain, Mentor

Train your staff and ensure that everyone is familiar with their responsibilities before the big day. Companies like Cloud Foundry or Pivotal offer cloud platform training courses and certification programs. Some of them are self-training programs as well.

Invest Carefully

You’ve made the decision that you don’t want to maintain your own infrastructure in-house. Which is great! Just be careful with your expenses. Plan them out over a longer period of time and try to cover necessities first. Then, splurge a little on things that are nice-to-haves, but not must-haves.

Transferring Legacy Apps – Summary

If there’s a will, there’s a way – everyone can find a solution that meets their expectations. Whether you go for a full PaaS implementation or only need post integration assistance, Grape Up offers full support, from platform enablement to the replatforming of exisiting apps, to helping you build your own lab and scale. We will walk you through the steps above and make sure that your journey to the cloud goes nice and smooth.