Cloud Migration Strategies for Application Modernisation

Do you have a cloud migration strategy to modernise your legacy applications? If the answer is no, you’re in the minority. Foundry’s recent 2022 Cloud Computing Survey found that only 6% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) have not yet decided on a modernisation strategy and a further 6% have no cloud migration plans.  

If you don’t want your business to be left behind and want to maintain a competitive advantage this article will give you some food for thought on how to kick-start your cloud strategy. 

Cloud application migration drivers 

Over the past few years, businesses have faced rapidly changing market conditions that have seen workforces migrate to hybrid working, heavily disrupted supply chains, and costs rise. These are all driving factors in organisations taking positive action to play out their cloud migrations and kick-start app modernisation with microservices.  

In fact, 69% of organisations have accelerated their cloud migration over the past 12 months. The percentage of companies with most or all their IT infrastructure in the cloud is expected to jump from 41% to 63% in the next 18 months. 

By investing in cloud infrastructure, businesses can better support disaster recovery and business continuity, lower their total cost of ownership, and improve employee productivity.  

Of course, creating a robust cloud migration strategy is not without its challenges. ITDMs site the skills gap as a blocker as they’ve struggled to find employees with the necessary security expertise and cloud management skills to deliver their application modernisation. Certainly, third-party professional cloud service providers, like Cloud Know How, have gone a long way to supporting businesses with their cloud deployments.  

Migration strategies 

There are four main strategies to consider when modernising legacy monolithic applications.  

Rehosting, commonly referred to as a “lift and shift” migration, offers a no-code option that lets you migrate your existing applications to the cloud quickly, without the risk or cost of making code changes. This is a great option for businesses that don’t need to change the capabilities of their application right away.  

Refactoring, or repackaging, is a cloud migration strategy that requires some change to the application design but no wholesale changes to the application code. Although another quick way to modernise applications, you will need to have an existing codebase and development skills to execute. If code portability is a concern this is a good method to consider.  

Rearchitecting is a useful way of taking advantage of your existing application investments while modernising them with new cloud capabilities. By breaking down your application and rebuilding it with a new design you can meet scalability requirements in a cost-effective way.  

Rebuilding requires you to build your application from scratch using cloud-native technologies. With this method you immediately shed application reliance on underlying infrastructure, middleware, complex licensing, and other resources. When your existing application is slowing down business innovation, rebuilding in the cloud can allow you to rapidly develop with the latest new technologies like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.  

You can start with any of these cloud migration strategies, though what you choose will depend on your existing workloads and cloud adoption path. You’ll need an in-depth understanding of your on-premises applications and servers so that you can identify dependencies and create a full picture of all communication among workloads. Then you’ll be able to accurately analyse the configuration and plan your costs.  

Multi-cloud strategies  

Evaluating the right cloud provider is an essential part of developing a cloud-first strategy, and you don’t always need to limit yourself to just one. Foundry’s research found that 18% of businesses are in the process of or have deployed a multi-cloud architecture.  

What’s the appeal of a multi-cloud strategy? It allows you to use a combination of public and private clouds and select different cloud services or features from different providers. This gives you potential benefits like greater platform flexibility, optimal cost savings, and improved disaster recovery prospects (concurrent and simultaneous downtime across multiple clouds is very unlikely). This strategy also helps you to avoid vendor lock-in.  

Where to go next? 

Defining and deploying your cloud migration strategy is no small feat.  

You can download our Cloud Migration Essentials E-book which covers:  

• Preliminary steps to consider when looking at migration. 
• Various approaches for rehosting, refactoring, rearchitecting, and rebuilding workloads for the cloud. 
• Tools you can use to accelerate your migration project. 
• Tips for post-migration success. 

If you need further advice or support, we can help. Our professional services team, Cloud Know How, is made up of certified cloud engineers and architects, with specialisms in Microsoft Azure.  

They offer an Azure Design Service, which delivers a high-level Azure architecture design in consideration of the five pillars of a well-architected Azure framework. They also offer an Azure Health Check and Azure Monitoring Service.

Get in touch with our team today for a no-strings-attached consultation.