The adoption of public cloud is growing fast. But, what's standing in the way of full cloud adoption? For many companies it's those burdensome (but critically important) legacy applications. Moving more workloads to the cloud is a top IT priority, so eventually it will be time to consider how to make those critical legacy applications cloud ready. In Part 1 of this blog, I outlined the first four of eight steps to chart your cloud journey. In addition, consider the next four steps below:
Start with: 8 Steps for Making Legacy Apps "Cloud Ready" - Part 1
5. Automate wherever you can
As you adapt legacy applications for the cloud consistently look for ways to improve automation and orchestration. Here is your opportunity to improve your applications for greater productivity and performance for your IT teams.
But even more, you can automate your development by containerizing the coding process, not just the deployment. By automating tedious tasks, both development and operational, you'll free your team to do more, faster. That means a compounded effect on the speed and resources for your next cloud migration projects.
Look for tools to help that give you the proven building blocks to make your application a success in the cloud. These building blocks can deliver proven operations that also limit your testing and speed your application release cycles.
6. Embrace a cloud culture as well as a cloud strategy
You can't realize all the benefits of the cloud if you simply migrate applications without adapting your DevOps team's culture. If your team isn't ready to collaborate and develop using an agile vs. waterfall approach, you won't be able to leverage the true value of the cloud. The cloud can enable you to develop quickly, fail fast and speed your release cycles. But if your teams aren't ready to support this, the cloud's value is diminished greatly. Train your teams and drive a collaborative culture to ensure success.
7. Secure your cloud applications
In today's age, security can't be an afterthought. As you prepare for and migrate your legacy applications to the cloud, be sure to build in security best practices. While the cloud can give you an extra layer of security based on public cloud SLAs and compliance requirements, you must also entrust the people and processes adapting your applications to adhere to security guidelines.
Everyone is responsible for the security of applications – not just security teams. That includes the development teams, operations teams and users. Be sure that each follows stringent processes for a reliable, in-depth, defense.
8. Cloud ready isn't always the answer
Understand that some applications may never be right for the cloud. But in making that decision, do it with full understanding of the costs involved. If a legacy application won't be moved to the cloud, evaluate the on-premises infrastructure costs it requires to remain inside your data center.
If the value of the application is far greater than the cost of maintaining the infrastructure to support it, you've arrived at the right decision. If not, go back to the beginning and assess where it may fall in your migration assessment.
Don't let legacy applications stall your move to the cloud. With a strategic approach and close alignment with the business you can map out a migration strategy that will enable you to take advantage of the cloud's agility and scalability, while right-sizing applications along the way for greater appreciation of your cloud total cost of ownership.
