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Cloud Legacy Technology- It has been widely accepted by now that cloud computing is not just computing for the future but is the most effective computing for now in terms easy deployment, flexibility and even costs.
The result is that most enterprise over the past 5 years have moved to the cloud and access whatever applications they need though private our public clouds.
Forrester Research
Notwithstanding the advantages of cloud, it also leaves a lot of enterprises with a lot of legacy applications that cannot be just ripped out or decommissioned by many of them still play a significant role in the enterprise or contact data reservoirs that have not been migrated to the cloud.
Take the example of enterprise content management systems. According to Forrester’s recent Wave for Content Platforms the enterprise content management (ECM) market continues its evolution to cloud-first, flexible, extensible platforms. If modern content platforms now dominate the vendor landscape, and customers continue a steady pace of migration to these platforms — away from aging, on-premises repositories, the Wave reads, vendors with mature offerings have rearchitected their platforms to take full advantage of cloud scalability.
On top of that, the research adds, newer cloud vendors continue to invest in advanced capabilities for governance and automation. All vendors are embracing AI and ML to automate routine activities and are building design and development tools to help their clients deliver tailored user experiences and meet specific vertical requirements. In these circumstances, the future and use of legacy applications are a key part of the digital transformation of many enterprises.
Planning for Legacy Technology
Most organizations have complicated technology ecosystems that must be audited, documented, and unraveled just to start planning a move — so, moving to the cloud is not something that should be rushed. Organizations should take the time to plan properly to understand the outcomes of all their systems, Daniel Herndon, director of cloud services at Long Beach, Calif.-based Laserfiche, said.
Not all software is the same and understanding the priority of your systems is a great starting point for planning the future of legacy systems. “Moving all of an organization’s technology to the cloud will take time, and the timeline of the migration will help to determine the future of legacy systems,” he said.
Understanding the product roadmap of your legacy technology could reveal the future path of migration to the cloud. It might be the case that the introduction of a future cloud service falls within the timeline of the organization’s larger migration strategy. It may also be the case that your software provider will offer attractive discounts for sticking with them, which offsets the expense of maintaining the internal resources.
It is also possible that some legacy technologies will never move to the cloud. Some systems handle sensitive workloads that must remain in the corporate network or need to support integrations with sensitive systems. In these cases, web APIs can be used to integrate these legacy systems with the cloud-based systems. So, even if the technology is not available or cannot be supported in the cloud, there are still options available that allow these technologies to remain a vital part of the enterprise’s technology ecosystem.
