Cloud Migration Use Cases: When to Make the Shift

Through our conversations with CIOs and technology leaders, we uncover four specific scenarios when it is a no-brainer to make the shift from a legacy system to a modern, cloud-based platform to manage your company’s business systems and applications.  

How and Why Thomson Reuters Migrated to the Cloud 

In 2018, Thomson Reuters, one of the world’s leading business information services companies, was looking to migrate a collection of over 400 business applications to the cloud. At the time, these applications were hosted in their own data centers – about seven of them located in various geographic locations.  

Thomson Reuters was committed to a cloud-first strategy that came right from the top, keeping in mind the various financial and business advantages of moving to the cloud. It decided to partner with AWS for infrastructure, and the company’s in-house IT team along with a couple of technology services providers worked on upgrading and modernising the apps – redeploying them to the cloud.  

Some of the key benefits of the migration were:  

• IT-Ops became easier as infrastructure-related bottlenecks were taken care of by AWS 

• It was easy to scale up or scale down infrastructure as needed, helping reduce costs by over 20% 
• Cloud-based apps were more future-proof, laying the foundation to modernise further  
• It was easier in terms of operations, support, and maintenance  

Cloud Migration Models That Work 

Much like Thomson Reuters, several companies are looking to migrate a whole host of business applications to the cloud.  

As a Merit expert says, “While the biggest drivers of migrating to the cloud including minimising the cost of infrastructure and reducing burden on the IT team – it has also become easier to upgrade and modernise cloud-based applications with mobile-readiness and embedded analytics capabilities.”  

Broadly speaking, there are four common cloud migration models or use cases:  

Lift and Shift Cloud Migration 

As the name suggests, in this case, there are no changes made in terms of features, architecture, or data flow of the business application. One simply “lifts” moves the application that is hosted on-premise and “moves” it to the cloud. Depending on the requirements, there are several cloud hosting options available including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.  

In the case of lift and shift cloud migration, it is important to analyse compute resources that were needed when the application was hosted on-prem, and choose a cloud hosting plan as needed. Data security, compliance, and governance are fairly simple in this case, but they must be checked and verified once the migration is complete.  

This approach is primarily driven by cost factors related to infrastructure management. Business applications that have been “lifted and shifted” will often be upgraded and modernised in the long-run.  

Migrate to a SaaS-based Product 

In certain use cases, it makes sense to sunset a legacy application and replace it with a modern SaaS application.  

For instance, most modern companies have migrated to cloud-based SaaS products for CRM, QMS (Quality Management Software), Customer Support Helpdesk Software, Invoice Management, Subscription Billing, etc. These SaaS products are packed with newer features and capabilities, so it makes sense to not build or upgrade a piece of software when you can just rent one, often at a cost-effective monthly price.  

One important aspect to consider when replacing legacy software with a SaaS product is to opt for a product that seamlessly integrates the rest of your applications. It must offer simple APIs, so the data residing in the SaaS product can integrate with other applications, for BI and other purposes.  

Re-platforming 

Certain business applications are rather complicated, requiring constant upgrades and improvements. Let us take the example of a quality management system used by a manufacturing company. The company may currently be using a legacy software system to manage regulatory compliance and quality management documentation. But, it’s looking for a cloud-based QMS solution, one that is flexible, scalable, and customisable.  

In this case, a lift-and-shift approach or just shifting to a SaaS-based QMS will not be enough. There’s a need to upgrade the solution right at the platform level. The right way forward could be to go for a modern QMS built on a platform like Salesforce, but one that can be customised as per the company’s specific and unique requirements. The new QMS may offer better capabilities including in-build quality analytics, AI-enabled decision support, and better data visualisation features.  

Re-platforming is needed for mission-critical and purpose-built applications. These kinds of modern cloud-native applications are built from the ground up on the cloud, without worrying about legacy issues.  

Application Modernisation 

App modernisation is nothing but moving certain applications, processes, and data workloads to the cloud. It simply refers to a specific application that needs to be upgraded in terms of features and functionality – and then deploy to the cloud. These apps could be hosted on the private, public, or hybrid cloud depending on the customer’s preference or requirements.  

This is often used in tandem with the lift-and-shift approach. Applications are first moved to the cloud, and then once the application is stable a DevOps approach is used to add new features and deliver continuous improvements.  

The five key pillars of application modernisation include – security, reliability, cost optimisation, operational efficiency, and application performance. Each of these factors must be considered while launching new versions of the application.  

Merit’s Expertise in Cloud Migration Efforts  

Merit works with a broad range of clients and industry sectors, designing and building bespoke applications and data platforms combining software engineering, AI/ML, and data analytics.  

We migrate legacy systems with re-architecture and by refactoring them to contemporary technologies on modern cloud ecosystems. Our software engineers build resilient and scalable solutions with cloud services ranging from simple internal software systems to large-scale enterprise applications.  

Our agile approach drives every stage of the customer journey; from planning to design development and implementation, delivering impactful and cost-effective digital transformations. 

To know more, visit: https://www.meritdata-tech.com/service/code/digital-engineering-solutions/