How To Solve Legacy Support Issues During Cloud Migration

Digital transformation programs are forcing businesses to increase the availability of their data. Even though they are critical to operations, these ancient applications are notoriously limited in connectivity options, and connecting to the internal data stores is almost impossible.

Technical and political concerns often force projects to replace legacy systems to be delayed indefinitely. But the relative inefficiency of old applications, coupled with the need to access and unlock the data in them, means that upgrade/replacement is becoming a strategic priority.

Managing the present and future

The simplest solution to the technical challenge of ‘upgrading’ legacy systems is a lift-and-shift move to the cloud. The system is virtualized and recreated as-is on a hosted platform like AWS or Azure.

Although this helps to sever reliance on legacy hardware, it does nothing to improve application performance or availability. Instead you will need to invest (heavily) in rearchitecting the application to balance functionality with the ability to share data with other operations like analytics.

Stop-gap support

Re-engineering a major application takes time– almost certainly more than you expect. This creates a problem when arranging support for the older platform, particularly the underlying hardware.

In the event that your old arrays are still under OEM contract, you will have significant problems negotiating an open-ended support agreement. OEMs deal in fixed 12-month agreements; if your migration project takes 18 months, you’re paying for six months’ worth of coverage you’ll never use. 

Third-party storage maintenance services from CDS can help solve two problems for you. First, contract periods are negotiable and can be much shorter than the regular 12 months, so you’ll pay only for the coverage you need. Second, our support costs are up to 50% cheaper than the OEM, releasing cash that can be put towards funding the application migration project.

For years, CTOs have been able to ignore the problem of legacy applications because of the costs and complexity. But now that the information contained in those applications has become a strategic necessity, the problem must be confronted head-on.

Although CDS cannot help define the correct upgrade/migration roadmap for your business, we can help to keep your legacy hardware running in the interim period. Call CDS today to learn more about what we offer– and how we can help you save.