Making a Smart Transition to the Cloud With Legacy Software
More and more organizations are turning to cloud computing in order to cut costs and meet ever-growing demands. But can they still leverage their past investment in operating systems and applications, now running on dedicated servers or mainframes?
The short answer is “yes, but…” Here’s the long answer.
Leveraging the Old, Embracing the New
Software. Your agency can probably move all or most of its current software as well as data storage and processing to the cloud, with major benefits for your IT and business operations. In fact, a cloud-based approach makes excellent economic sense for most government organizations that want to keep their existing software.
Hosting software on the cloud removes the need for specialized hardware, which tends to cut costs in the long term. Not only that, but improving the system and implementing changes becomes cheaper and easier.
Operating Systems. It’s possible to install most types of operating systems on a cloud infrastructure, including recent versions of some mainframe operating systems, as long as they can run on commodity hardware. Your cloud provider doesn’t have to use the same hardware you do now; software emulation can enable the operating system to run on other cloud hardware.
Still, older operating systems and some operating systems that need to run on large, expensive mainframes may not be a good fit for the cloud. It’s often more cost effective to give up those operating systems and migrate your applications to a Web services infrastructure using a widespread language such as Java.
The initial migration comes with a price. But you’ll benefit afterward from lower maintenance costs, and the code will be much easier to maintain.
But Don’t Forget Licensing Fees
Licensing fees can complicate this picture. For instance, a mainframe operating system and its licensed modules may cost a hefty sum per server instance to run on a cloud infrastructure. If you’re running many low-powered instances, such expenditures can cancel out the economic gains of moving to the cloud.
In short, the real barriers to moving your legacy systems to the cloud may not be technical, but practical and financial.
All else being equal, the chances are good that cloud computing will work for your organization, even if you want to keep the software systems you have now.
For answers to your particular cloud-related questions, just call 212-447-1100 or email info@webintensive.com.
