The mantra to win in modern business landscape? Move as fast as technology is shaping it. For many enterprises, this means leaving behind legacy systems and embracing the cloud. But hey, is this journey really that simple? Actually, no. You need to consider a lot of moving parts so that transformation is consummated, impervious, and sustainable.
Numerous enterprises in New Zealand aren’t aware of what’s involved in this migration journey; they face unexpected costs, integration hurdles, and cultural resistance. Don’t worry, we are here to change that!
In this blog, API Connects – trusted globally for cloud integration solutions – will share a list of 10 things you should consider before shifting from legacy to cloud-native platforms. You can avoid common pitfalls, maximise value, and prepare your teams for the future. A future where agility is not an option but foundation of business growth.
What To Consider During Legacy to Cloud Transformation?
These tips will help you make the transformation smoother, smarter, and future-ready:
Assess and audit your existing systems
You must audit all of your legacy stack applications, databases, integrations, dependencies, data flows and business logic before you move them. Legacy systems in your company might be using old languages or proprietary databases. Chances are, there might not be any documentation as to how they are used, making migration random.
Auditing will help you find out some hidden dependencies, customisations and workflows, and possible compatibility problems. Ignore it and your migrated systems may not act as they are expected. Worse, they may fail.
Create a comprehensive inventory to get a solid starting point:
– Know what you possess
– What needs to be transferred
– What should be disposed of
– Where should you do some refactoring
Define clear goals and right migration approach
There’s no doubt your enterprise system has tons of applications. But should you treat them all the same? Not really. Before investing in cloud migration, establish the definition of success – cost savings, scalability, agility, or performance. Only then create a strategy that aligns with your desired objectives.
The most common migration approaches are:
– Rehosting (lift-and-shift)
– Replatforming
– Refactoring or rearchitecting
– SaaS replacement
– Retaining some pieces on-prem
To pick the right option, determine complexity, risk appetite and long-term vision of your legacy to cloud transformation project. Remember, a wrong approach will either bring along technical debt or result in inefficient cloud configuration.
Plan data migration and ensure data integrity
Moving to a place outside the application layer implies transferring data. And that is likely the most delicate part. Older databases in your legacy system might have data in obsolete formats or matching outliers. Migrating them directly can be risky.
Without adequate mapping, cleansing, and validation, data can turn out to be corrupted or inconsistent. A nightmare for operations, reporting and compliance! Your legacy to cloud migration process can also be slowed down or lead to downtime due to large volumes, legacy data quality problems or intricate relational structures.
Plan your migration processes, data validation, and fallback mechanisms adequately. This way, you can preserve integrity and continuity.
Re-architect with cloud-native (microservices, containers, CI/CD)
Here comes one of the most important steps. Simply lifting legacy applications to cloud frequently entails moving old constraints along with the failure. You won’t be able to enjoy cloud-native benefits at all. Instead, consider refactoring and rearchitecting. For those who don’t get it, we mean decomposing monoliths into microservices, containerising components (using Docker or Kubernetes), and enabling CI/CD pipelines.
This will help you unlock the true potential of the cloud system: scalability, agility, resilience. You can also easily respond to changing needs, deploy faster, and manage systems more dexterously in future.
Address security, compliance, and governance from day one
Relocation to cloud also means altering your security and compliance environment. Old systems frequently do not support modern-day security structures. Just rehosting them can introduce vulnerabilities to shared cloud infrastructure. To avoid data or compliance breaches, plan identity and access management (IAM), encryption (at rest and in transit), and compliance relevant to your industry or region.
Without strong governance at the outset, legacy to cloud migration may reveal your sensitive information, generate compliance issues, or destroy trust. Undercutting much of the positive effect of migration!
Don’t forget to check out these resources:
Cloud integration trends shaping enterprise IT infrastructure
Legacy application modernization
Secure integration of IoT and cloud computing
Manage costs – upfront and ongoing
Moving to cloud means a lot of savings. But if you’re not careful with managing costs, spending may soon get out of control. Enterprises should develop a cost-management approach including both one-time migration costs (refactoring, data transportation, and tooling) and ongoing cloud costs (compute, storage, licensing, data egress, etc).
Once live, implement resource rightsizing, auto-scaling, shutting down idle instances, and reserved/spot instances where suitable. Not to mention, apply tagging policies to monitor spend per team or project. This will help you create financial discipline, provide predictable spending in cloud, and prevent cloud bill shock.
Build the right team
Adopting cloud-native requires not just modern technology but also people, skills and mindset. Your IT team from legacy era might not be conversant with container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, DevOps tooling, and cloud-native architecture. If you want the transformation to be successful, invest in training or recruiting specialists who are familiar with the current cloud trends (microservices, automation, monitoring, and FinOps).
What’s equally important? Prepare your business for the change. Update processes, facilitate departmental stakeholder buy-in, and communicate impacts. Even a technically good migration can trip at the top without good organisational preparation due lack of adoption, misinterpretations, or resistance.
Plan phased migration and maintain business continuity
Rather than trying to migrate everything immediately from legacy to cloud systems (the big bang approach), go for phased migration. Start with non-critical applications or workloads. Then move to mission-critical systems. This will minimise risk.
You can conduct early tests, validate and refine your migration strategy. Identifying problems before they get serious and cause major effects. By operating existing systems and the new cloud configurations simultaneously during transition, downtime is reduced, operations are maintained, and breathing time is allowed to do extensive testing before a complete cut-over.
Post-migration optimization
Migration from legacy to cloud-native systems is just the start. After the workloads are launched to the cloud, it is necessary to monitor continuously, tune performance, and optimise costs. Use cloud-native monitoring and logging tools to check CPU usage, memory, latency, throughput and identification of anomalies in early stages.
Check resource consumption periodically – scale down over-provisioned servers, update auto-scaling policies, shut down idle resources, and migrate workloads to services with lower efficiency (e.g. containers, serverless, cold storage). These actions will assist you in ensuring performance and preventing wastage. Your cloud environment will remain lean, secure and cost-effective in the long term.
Align cloud strategy with business objectives and future-readiness
Migration from legacy systems to cloud should not be a mere tech exercise It should serve your broader business goals. Prior to and throughout migration, be certain that cloud architecture, services, and demand processes you adopt correspond to your strategic goals:
– Nimbleness
– Scalability
– Quicker time-to-market
– Innovation capacity
– Cost-effectiveness
– Regulatory requirements
– International coverage
Also, look ahead of the game. Select options that will enable future expansion, changing workloads, new technology, or hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud planning. So that your shift from legacy to cloud-native establishes long-term prosperity, not a temporary lift.
Hire API Connects For Fluent Cloud Migration
We have shared 10 strategies to consider when shifting from legacy to cloud-native systems. Each step will help you in making certain that the transformation goes smoothly, securely, and is aligned with your business goals. Cloud migration is not a technical upgrade anymore. It’s a strategic jump that can make your enterprise innovative. You can scale and compete easily in digital era.
API Connects can help you with migrating to the cloud. With 10+ years in the industry, we have expertise in legacy modernisation, cloud-native engineering, and complex enterprise integrations. Our engineers deliver solutions that are reliable, scalable, and built for the future.
Contact us at 092430360. Let’s discuss how your enterprise can thrive in the cloud today!
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