Billed as the answer to almost every IT challenge, the cloud has established itself as a channel for applying cutting edge technology.
The fact that many businesses first adopted cloud infrastructure as a way to spin up development platforms quickly and cheaply has helped to cement its position as a way to build all-new systems and applications.
An often overlooked fact however, is the way cloud also neatly support legacy applications – when deployed correctly.
IaaS + Legacy Applications = Match Made in Hell
It is important to realise that simply moving legacy applications into the cloud will not deliver much of a long-term benefit. You may be able to reduce your operating costs, and avoid future capital spend, but you will also face a much larger challenge – increased latency.
At a time when speed of data access is a competitive advantage, increasing latency is a backwards step. The only way to combat these problems is to re-engineer legacy applications to improve performance, often at far greater cost than the savings made by moving off-site.
Legacy and the cloud done right
Despite these problems, it is still possible for cloud and legacy applications to co-exist. Instead of moving older apps into the cloud, they should still be kept on site, immediately resolving the issue of latency.
The cloud can then be used to support bursting, using cloud resources to handle peaks in demand for processing or storage that your on-site systems cannot. This hybrid approach helps to ensure demand is always fulfilled, and avoids the traditional headache of investing in infrastructure to meet predicted resource needs.
It’s also worth noting that retaining legacy applications in their current form (i.e. not re-engineering them) also reduces the learning curve to nothing. Everything continues to function as your end users are accustomed to, because virtually everything is the same.
And most importantly of all, your stable and reliable legacy apps can remain on the same stable and reliable hardware – even after the OEM’s warranty period expires. With the assistance of a skilled third party support and maintenance provider, you can integrate cloud bursting with your existing systems to realize the best of both worlds – and save money in the process.
To learn more about extending the lifespan of your legacy apps with third party support for your storage platforms, please get in touch.