Issues In Migrating Legacy Systems To The Cloud

by Salman UI Haq on July 10, 2013

 

in Cloud Computing, Computing, Host, How to, IT, Security, Storage, Technology

Issues in Migrating Legacy Systems to the Cloud

Increasing Cloud adoption by small and big enterprises is primarily fuelled by the growing demand for resource and service consolidation coupled with efficient resource usage while delivering cost savings. With these benefits comes with the challenges of integrating diverse set of service portfolio. Cloud integration has its own plethora of issues which might be alien for small to medium sized enterprises which are new to the Cloud and do not have the expertise to deal with Cloud migration and integration issues. Let us, very briefly look at some of the issues companies face when integrating legacy systems and services on the Cloud.

Often times, it may not be a good idea to integrate legacy SaaS systems into IaaS Cloud for a small enterprise because of added security risks which have to be addressed. In some verticals like healthcare, failure to properly address security risks when integrating legacy systems into the Cloud may result in more damage than benefit. IT departments often need to write custom component to fill in the gaps. Another issue to resolve is designing and building APIs (Application Programming Interface) to extend on the usability of the integrated Cloud services and give developers a way to add in new services to the portfolio. Without an API, the Cloud could very well be locked in which will eventually reduce the gains in productivity down the line. No matter how easy the API Cloud integration seems, there is always a risk factor involved because of the volatile practices. Each API has its own way of ensuring security and cross platform calls in Cloud environments, which tend to differ greatly on platforms that are likely to deplete the scalability and robustness.

In order to avoid spaghetti integrations, organizations must keep in mind the difference between on-premises secure Cloud and legacy system scalability. The inter-departmental communication is always a key; which means you can’t replace your IT with the Cloud – the IT will still be needed to keep the services running, maintenance and troubleshooting are things which better not be outsourced on the Cloud. A good migration to the Cloud is always composite and standards compliant. Experts argue that deployment of integration tools like CORBA , Client Server to Web services, EAI and SOA and Oracle Fusion Middleware should be on the top of the checklist when you consider Cloud migration. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the most appropriate layered architecture in which business entities can be analyzed at the top layer whereas the real time or static data integration takes place in the lower layers.

There is a diverse choice of integration types like application integration where the resource based integration occurs with the cloud or data integration in which batch processing of large volumes of data takes place. The choice must be made perfectly in accordance with the organizational needs to get optimum results.