Application Migration

Moving an enterprise application from one environment to another is referred to as application migration. In the modern tech space, app migration generally means moving data centers – from on-premise to cloud environments, or in some cases from public cloud to private cloud spaces and even to a hybrid environment for greater agility and scope for innovation.

A business can consider app migration for the following other primary reasons:

• Upgrading physical structures for corporate environments
• Reducing overhead expenses by moving internal apps to the cloud
• Enabling tech teams to prioritize critical tech projects than just maintaining hardware
• Adding top-notch functionalities that didn’t exist on the legacy systems

It is undeniable that enterprise app migration is one crucial business decision that requires cross-functional collaborations and seamless communication for seamless execution.

Here’s a quick checklist that every CTO must consider before they actually decide to migrate enterprise apps:

• How far will the migration drive affect business continuity?
• What will be the size of the migration project?
• What is the approximate timeline for the migration project?
• What will be the cost for the migration drive?
• What is the estimated ROI?
• What volume of data is required to be moved?
• What should be done to maintain the integration levels as before migration?
• Can existing resources and tools help with the migration project?
• In what chronology should apps/app functions be moved?
• Should all apps be moved to one hosting option?
• What can be done to ensure data security?

And most importantly,

• Is the migration project at all necessary?

Out of all these questions, the last one is the determinant of your business success. We must remember how essential it is to assess one’s business processes for deeming if a migration project is at all necessary.

As per a recent survey by Mckinsey, most respondents have decided to spend around 55% of their IT budgets on cloud migration by 2021, which earlier was limited only to 45%.

Enterprise apps are built in a way that they are suited to run on specific operating systems under particular network architectures. So, moving an enterprise app to a brand-new environment can jeopardize several business functions if not done under a perfect migration plan.

A CTO should devise an app migration strategy considering all dependencies and tech requirements of the enterprise app, along with factors like data security, cost constraints and compliance standards. One must remember that even within the same tech environment, different apps can take different paths on the cloud.

Enterprise Application Assessment

Also known as tech application audit, this step generally involves 3 stages:

• Reviewing existing toolsets
• Critically analyzing and evaluating scenarios
• Visualizing the final outcome

The audit process of an app involves assessing its tech stack, mapping its agility, scalability, fault tolerance with the app creation timeline and its server environment. By assessing the enterprise app’s security and compliance concerns along with the user assess management schedule, its migration readiness can be determined.

As a next step, a CTO needs to apps or functionalities that should be migrated to the new environment first – this is based on the app dependencies, level of business-critical functions the app carries out and other availability requirements. Along with this, CTOs need to identify the business processes maintained by the apps under migration. Business process maps need to be drawn up to ensure that all necessary functionalities are considered for migration.

Pro Tip: CTOs must consider enterprise apps with lesser dependencies and customer-facing apps for the first rounds of migration. Creating ‘migration groups’ based on dependency details, tech requirements and business utility helps reduce migration risks, time and saves cost considerations.

The tech audit can give CTOs a thorough look at the business’ tech stack complexity, along with the volume of data required to be moved and the durability of the physical infrastructure. CTOs must consider their development plans. Tech audits have the capacity to improve not just the tool functionalities, but the entire underlying processes too.

Often discrepancies and conflicts between the existing and targeted tools are discovered at this stage.

Assembling Project Requirements

Before embarking on a migration drive, CTOs need to measure up the technical, business and security requirements. This calls for a huge documentation and prioritizing procedure before taking the final call – be it just realigning tools or rebuilding infrastructures. The requirement docs should yield answers to the following questions – What are they going to do? When is the action being taken? and Who is facilitating the shift?

CTOs need to have a comprehensive catalog of all business apps, categorized in terms of performing critical business functions and at what stage the business stands from migrating them to the cloud.

It is crucial that the value of the enterprise apps is judged on certain parameters:

• Impact on business
• Size of app, its complexity and manageability
• Cost to company for maintenance and development
• Importance of the app data in business continuity
• Value from cloud migration

At this stage, a cloud affinity assessment is indispensable to determine if an app is ready for migration or requires considerable changes in environment to be considered ‘cloud-ready’. There are several app dependency discovery tools that aid in determining the feasibility of migrating apps for critical business functions, outside their existing environment.

It is also important to have a 360-degree view of app dependencies:

1. Hardware and software load balancing
2. Containers and microservices
3. Data flows and dependencies

One needs to plan and decide on the best migration approach for a smooth transition.

Just like a suitable app migration approach, the right enterprise application migration strategy is equally resourceful for a seamless transition. However, CTOs must decide on the right migration strategy based on:

• Resources available
• Migration goals
• Audit results

Complete Migration

This refers to moving the whole stack or all instances of the enterprise apps at once. A complete migration offers lower cost considerations and shorter timelines. However, in case of large data sets where onboarding of users in on a large scale, complete migration may prove to be difficult for large-scale migrations.

Phased Migration

A phased migration process allows CTOs to move data and apps in a step-by-step method. After each segment is migrated, the onboarding of affected users is completed, which is followed by first-hand feedbacks and solution integration before moving on to the next step.

For projects of larger complexity when a downtime of all instances can prove fatal, a phased migration can be a savior. Though a phased migration can give rise to higher cost and longer migration timelines.

Partial Migration

In this case, only a part of the data for selected processes is moved. This leaves room for retaining some data in the on-premise mode while another chunk is moved to the cloud. The benefit of the process is that the internal stakeholders get enough scope to acclimatize themselves to the cloud.

These days all business processes are data sensitive. CTOs need to chalk out safe data migration strategies to protect enterprise data. Here are a few essential functions that data migration teams need to follow:

• Performing a data validation check to avoid duplicity
• Creating paths guiding data extraction, sanitization and integration into the target environment.
• Leveraging automation tools for data migration (based on data availability)
• Testing the results of integration

App Migration Testing

All agile environments support continuous testing and app migration is no different. CTOs must ensure that they have an extensive testing schedule in place which:

• Migrates enterprise app/ apps
• Migrates dependent apps and APIs
• Sets up new production environment
• Updates configurations and documents changes
• Set us app monitoring tools
• Analyzes app downtimes
• Vets if migration activity has affected app performance and functionalities

Pro Tip: It is a wise decision to split enterprise app cloud migration into clear, iterative parts to minimize operational downtimes. It is also advisable to employ auto tests for checking any deviation extensively.

Retiring parts of old apps

As a good practice, a migration project should also involve decommissioning unnecessary software parts of apps that have been migrated to cloud environments. It is essential to roll down relevant vendor contracts and monitoring tools.

Best industry practice: It is best that the source environment is left untouched for at least 4 weeks after the migration in case the new environment faces code conversion issues. The source environment can be disabled after that and completely deleted after 12 months’ time.

A veteran in the IT space with 25 years of experience, Radixweb has migrated innumerable legacy apps to the cloud. We can help you with:

Enterprise Migration Consulting:

Migrate enterprise apps seamlessly by choosing the right app migration approach and strategies. We’ll help you make a checklist:

1. Analysis of migration goals and business needs
2. Weighing ROI and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Assessment
3. Designing a migration roadmap
4. Finalizing a target app architecture
5. Finalizing CI/CD tools, data storage considerations and cloud platforms
6. Planning cost effective management for migrated apps

A survey by globenewswire revealed that nearly 79% of the respondents agree that legacy apps are hindering their digital transformation initiatives, while the rest are okay with their on-premise apps.

Enterprise Migration Implementation:

Right from assessment to planning and execution, we make your app migration project a hassle-free effort:

1. App migration roadmap
2. Automating code conversion
3. Iterative migration (re-architecting and legacy re-engineering)
4. New application development
5. Finalizing the app environment – public/ private/ hybrid
6. Decommissioning old apps
7. Post migration activities (ensuring stability, security, cost optimization etc.)

Application migration services often paves the way for innovation. And the journey to the cloud, is undoubtedly a highly significant one. Just like app migration has a multitude of benefits, a hundred- thousand things can go wrong. It is thus, crucial to have a perfect change management plan devised by impeccable drivers of growth.

At Radixweb, we have been modernizing innumerable legacy environments into new tech possibilities. As a prized tech partner for the last 25 years, we can help you get on ‘cloud 9’ with the best possible migration strategies and business tools.