As an IT Director you may be considering migrating your legacy application but it might not always be the best move for your business. If you’re considering migrating from a legacy question here are 6 questions you should ask yourself first.

1. Why Do You Want to Move This Application?

Is it to save costs, or help your company keep up with innovation? Are your employees demanding more mobility, or do you need to access greater compute resources?

You need to spell out clear and specific goals and ROI for migrating your application.
Things to consider:

  • achieving 99.999% uptime – then you would have to go a long way to beat the IBM System i server
  • simplifying patches and updates – then the IBM System i supports backwards compatibility and there is plenty of support around.
  • The risk to the business of moving

2. What Business Value Can You Derive From Moving Your Application?

Does your legacy app continue to provide strategic value to your company? The old adage springs to mind, if it’s not broken don’t fix it. Will a replacement continue to provide value for the foreseeable future or will it nee d to be replaced again in 5-10 yrs?

3. What Critical Data Does Your Legacy App Contain, and Does Moving Pose a Risk?

Evaluate your legacy application to determine if it contains critical data that may be too sensitive to move. You also need to understand how moving and storing critical data during a migration will impact your business. Assess the security threats of migrating an application and run through the various scenarios that may result from a data breach. If the security implications far outweigh the benefits of a move, you’ll know that the application is too sensitive to move especially to a cloud-based solution

4. How Will the Application Perform in the Cloud?

Let’s get straight to the point: will the application perform better in the new solution? In some industries, such as insurance and banking, the applications were developed decades ago and they are processing huge volumes of data and some solutions won’t be able to handle the amount of data you need to process. A simple “lift and shift” of data from one system to another does not guarantee higher performance.

5. What Complexities Surround Your Legacy Application?

Take a look at all the existing components of your application, as well as any dependencies it has with other systems. Do you even know what they all are? How will migration impact these dependencies?

Consider how your other applications integrate and the complexity of each integration. Can the systems continue to work together, or will performance be compromised? What extra measures will you need to take to successfully integrate other systems with your new proposed application. Are they cost-effective for your business?

6. Do You Have to Comply with Any Regulations?

Are there industry regulations you must comply with that will prevent you from moving the application.

Heavily regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government must comply with regulations regarding data security, privacy, and confidentiality that require specially managed security and storage.

How about updating and maintaining your legacy system instead?

We have many years of experience with legacy systems and making them fit for purpose for a range of businesses. Find out how we can help or get in contact to discuss your maintenance and upgrade needs for your legacy system to ensure your business is running effectively.