Just as the sweet voices of the sirens beckoned Odysseus, the cloud is calling, and IT teams in enterprises large and small are listening. Making this trip — the migration to the cloud — involves replatforming or modifying a legacy system to work optimally in the cloud. In most cases, this strategy requires technical expertise that many organizations do not have. This is when they opt to outsource this process to companies like Asinpa.
Advantages and Challenges
According to Gustavo (Tavo) Vasconcelos, founder and CEO of Asinpa, “For companies running on-premise software, there are many advantages to replatforming, including enhanced scalability, better resiliency, tighter security, and reduced costs. However, the process is not as simple as flipping a switch.
“In order to reap the benefits of migration to the cloud, an enterprise cannot simply move its applications from its data center to a cloud service such as AWS or Azure. Cloud services need to be leveraged and code and application configuration changes are necessary for this. If a company is not taking advantage of the cloud-native features, it will not experience the full benefits of the migration.
“Knowing how to manage this replatforming process is specialized expertise, and most companies find it more cost-efficient to outsource this to companies like ours.”
The Process of Replatforming
“While the company’s business needs will dictate the specific approach to replatforming its applications,” Tavo said, “There are several general actions that Asinpa takes in performing this service for clients. These include:
- Assessing Needs
Understanding specific, well-defined business objectives is crucial to achieving a positive result. For example, an enterprise may need to switch to more scalable cloud storage. This, and other specific objectives, would be added to the scope of work.
- Choosing a Platform That Meets These Needs
There are so many choices for cloud platforms, each with advantages and disadvantages—Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to name just two. Plus, organizations that are focused on e-commerce might choose a “headless” platform. To leverage the advantages of each platform, these beneficial aspects must be understood by the development team.
- Updating the Enterprise Application or Workload
Some companies find that they need to make changes to their application(s) or infrastructure. Using well-defined and lightweight APIs is one way to achieve this. Incrementally changing the workload, one step at a time, can prevent escalating costs.
- Migrating to Staging Application for Validations
A staging environment that is a replicate of production is considered a best practice. This environment will serve as the final gate for user acceptance testing and parallel testing as the incremental changes get prepared for production rollout.
- Transitioning to Production
The final step, occurring after validation, is transitioning to the new platform, and monitoring and testing the application once it is live.
“Replatforming to the cloud has proven to be a cost-effective strategy for many if not most, companies,” Tavo said. “The benefits are many, but the expertise to execute this process is seldom available in-house. This is why our development team has been chosen by so many companies to do this job,” he concluded.
