A Process Framework to Migrate Legacy Application to Cloud: LAMP2C

Introduction

Technology landscape is evolving ever since it came into existence but since the arrival of internet technology landscape is changing at a faster pace than ever before. Keeping pace with changing technology has become a challenge in itself for an enterprise, however important is that enterprise can’t ignore these technological enhancement i.e. it has to adopt these new technologies to keep themselves competitive and make most out of an existing application or portfolio of applications.

Legacy application were developed using hardware, software and coding platform that were relevant during that point of time. These application were enterprises backbone and same holds good today as well, however with the technology technological enhancement multiple other challenges are faced by enterprises in terms of shortage of skilled manpower availability, knowledge retention, cost increase with respect to maintenance of software and hardware, unable to scale the software, reduced efficiencies and effectiveness of operators, which will effect business progress, customers impression or understanding and company’s image agility to serve customer (Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, et al., 2010). Challenges highlighted are specific either to enterprise or legacy application however few challenges which remains common irrespective to the enterprise size, software, hardware, etc. Ref. Figure 1

Figure 1.

Legacy Application Maintains and Enhancement Challenge

• 1.

  Customer

  • a.

    Application is an important factor in addressing the competition. Enterprise business interest may get influenced due to Application inefficiency.

  • b.

    Application may not meet customer expectation in terms of

    • i.

      Application efficiency, which may lead to dissatisfied customer and may effect on future business.

    • ii.

      Functionality/feature, which will provide an edge to competition i.e. application is not able to keep up with business growth.

    • iii.

      Inefficient application, will lead to dissatisfied customer.

• 2.

  Knowledge

  • a.

    Lack of extensive legacy application knowledge may impact on:

    • i.

      Adding additional functionality to application

    • ii.

      Enhancements of the application and.

    • iii.

      System maintenance

  • b.

    Non-availability of many legacy application knowledgeable resources may face challenges in terms of sharing legacy application knowledge and its best practices.

  • c.

    Knowledge concentration within set of people increases the dependency on fixed number of people.

• 3.

  Resources

  • a.

    Reduction in resource’s pool due to attrition or their desire to learn market-relevant technology (Rashmi Rai, et al., 2013) or any other reason, will impact resource availability in market for legacy application maintenance, it includes enhancement.

  • b.

    As application knowledge and understanding gets concentrated within limited number of resources; people retention cost will increase. Related aspect will be - getting resource with higher cost in required technology.

• 4.

  Technology

  • a.

    Existing enterprise critical application may be using multiple technology, so application maintenance cost will be high in terms of skilled manpower, licenses, etc. (Rashmi Rai, et al., 2013)

  • b.

    Non-existence of product support from product vendor, may impact to support activities of legacy application. It will also have direct impact on the availability of skilled man power.

  • c.

    Applications are device dependent i.e. these applications are not accessible on any other machine/device than office computers.

• 5.

  Compliance

  • a.

    If no enhancement is made to legacy applications; it may lead it to become regulatory non-compliance (Rashmi Rai, et al., 2013).

  • b.

    Regulatory non-compliance is bigger risk to an enterprise than adopting relevant technology by migrating legacy application to.

• 6.

  High Operating Cost (Support and maintenance)

  • a.

    Legacy system operating cost increases due to hardware, staff’s training, inefficiency, outages, etc. some of the costs which are generally not stated in budget are customer’s loyalty, employee’s satisfaction and brand image.

  • b.

    Revenue earned using better tools and technology, by competitor, should be considered as lost revenue due to inability of using relevant technology. However, it may not be possible to arrive at the loss of revenue an enterprise is making due to non-investment in latest technology.