Within every organization, hundreds of custom software programs take care of critical tasks and workflows. Adding mobile notifications, coordinating employee shifts, planning flight paths, requesting website changes, managing patient records, improving factory processes — there are an infinite variety of ways to accomplish business needs, so it’s no surprise that packaged applications alone cannot anticipate them all. In fact, these programs become bonded to the very fabric of a company since they support such unique capabilities. Consequently, they often last long past their useful life, consuming network bandwidth and IT sanity while possibly exposing security flaws and preventing the adoption of newer, more user-friendly technologies such as containers, microservices, or IoT sensors.
The average enterprise has hundreds of custom applications, for everything from departmental use to enterprise-wide processes — and a large chunk of these are hosted in-house. In a recent report by Flexera, 48% of enterprise respondents have workloads in the public cloud, and 9% are planning to add workloads in the next year. That leaves 43% that are chugging along on their own dusty hardware and possibly holding their company back.
Custom apps, frequently built on application servers, such as Oracle WebLogic, Apache Tomcat®, JBoss®, and IBM WebSphere® are at the core of business today. These custom apps may be unique to the organization’s environment and bristling with integrations to other core business apps and databases.
The “WHY” of app migration
Today, organizations are more dependent than ever on technology to forge connections, collaborate, keep raw materials and finished goods moving, and mine data. The world’s nimblest companies not only enjoy the unique advantages of cloud computing, but they also actively seek to migrate their custom apps out of their own costly data centers.
Primary motivations for line of business managers, IT managers, application development leaders, and DevOps teams to move their business applications to the cloud include:
- Modernizing Applications
- Efficiency of Managing Dev, Test, and Production Environments
- Addressing Performance Requirements and Latency
- Lowering Operational Costs
It’s easier to develop and maintain applications in the cloud
Moving custom and WebLogic apps to the cloud supports a global business strategy, speeds product releases, and enables innovation to fend off the competition. Organizations can reclaim efficiencies, eliminate over-provisioning and end budget battles over capital expenditures by migrating to the cloud. With a transparent, pay-as-you-go model in the cloud, you can scale up only when your business demands it, or you can ramp down or make idle in minutes when you don’t, such as when you are creating development and test environments or prototyping.
IT departments are finding that the process of cloud migration is becoming less complex through new deployment techniques, such as defining infrastructure as code and adopting a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline approach for faster software updates at lower, more predictable costs. These DevOps best practices can continue to be leveraged long after making the move to the cloud.
Every area of software and application development can now be moved to the cloud, including:
- Oracle packaged enterprise applications such as E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and others.
- ISV-developed apps, such as OPERA PMS, JASCI, Sage, Viewpoint.
- Custom or 3rd party apps in Java, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Python and more.
- Application servers like WebLogic Server, Tomcat, JBoss, or other middleware that can run in the cloud.
Methods to migrate, build, and manage custom apps in the cloud
Taking a critical look at a company’s IT infrastructure often reveals systems that are running low on computing resources, legacy or outdated hardware, or an inability to meet business needs. IT, database, and app development managers need to collaborate to understand the best strategy to migrate or build an upgraded application architecture. In today’s cloud, which fits a range of businesses from early stage companies to global enterprises, there exists a myriad of deployment options, from the infrastructure or database layer to containers and services.
3 Primary approaches to moving enterprise apps to the cloud
- Move – Reduce costs, maximize performance
Migrate from on-premises to an analogous cloud architecture by moving the application ecosystem with minimal changes. Moving “as is” targets cost reduction, improving end-user experience, and future proofing architectures.
Pain points addressed:
- Capacity constraints
- Outdated hardware
- Difficulty scaling
- Performance degradation
- Improve – Address administration/functionality challenges
Migrate to the cloud and improve the workload by updating application/database versions with potential additions to key features or capabilities. Common enhancements include strengthened security, improved high availability/disaster recovery, more automated administration and added mobile apps or digital assistants (chat bots).
Pain points addressed:
- High administration costs
- Lack of modern functionality
- Outdated software versions
- Weak Security
- Modernize – Shift to new technology or add functionality
Rewrite or develop new applications in the cloud by taking advantage of cloud native development tools and a contemporary DevOps architecture. Modernizing may also involve the implementation of containers with Docker and Kubernetes, as well as coding for microservices.
Pain points addressed:
- Antiquated application code
- Missing or incompatible app dependencies
- Lacking code portability across systems
- Complex/slow dev/test to production process
The path forward
Embarking on any cloud migration plan means evaluating a wide selection of both public and private cloud providers. The needs and requirements across different companies, entities, or departments will differ based on the workload, database, storage, integration, connectivity, networking, and security requirements.
Do you need help in moving your custom applications to the cloud? Write to us at marketing@cloverinfotech.com and we’ll arrange an exclusive session for you with our cloud experts.
