Member Article

Legacy architecture: how to avoid getting stuck halfway in the modernisation process

Advances in platform options and SaaS are driving more organisations to the cloud than ever before; public cloud spend is now a significant line item in IT budgets, the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud report found. In 2022, 53% of businesses will spend more than $1.2 million on public cloud — up from 38% last year. Organisations are now operating entire businesses in the cloud and benefiting from faster, more efficient, reliable, secure and scalable computing.

But many organisations with legacy architecture and code are finding themselves competing with businesses that have been ‘born in the cloud’ and lacking the agility of their competitors. It’s likely their legacy architecture may be hampering digital modernisation due to applications that cannot be easily shifted to SaaS or consumption-based models offered by the public cloud. Thanks to the rate of digital transformation, legacy applications and the platforms that run them can soon become a millstone around a company’s neck. No organisation wants to be left stuck halfway through their digital transformation.

Stuck with mounting costs to pay

Another reason to shift workloads to the cloud is cost. Companies can be put in a tricky position if they are stuck in a mix of legacy and cloud-native workloads without being able to reduce costs.

If a business is running legacy applications on-premises utilising physical servers, those boxes must stay in place until the last workload moves off the hardware. The capex investment remains the same in terms of power, cooling and maintenance costs regardless of the capacity the legacy workloads are consuming.

As the workloads are moved into the public cloud in phases, cloud spend increases but the baseline costs are the same whether you have one or 200 workloads running on the on-premises infrastructure.

What can be done about legacy workloads?

It’s possible for organisations to incrementally modernise their application architecture to containerised microservices that can take advantage of hyperscale public clouds. For many businesses, both large and small, the default solution is x86, but there is another solution to use a provider who can offer compatible IBM Power Servers in a cloud model. It’s then possible to ‘lift and shift’ that legacy workload into a cloud consumption model and immediately remove the capex cost of the underlying, aging hardware.

This model leverages economies of scale as one platform can service multiple customers. It helps create a best-of-both worlds cloud strategy with adjacent x86 systems in Azure, while IBM Power stays on-premises, or also moves to the MSP’s cloud environment. Not only does it allow existing core applications to continue running in an optimised IBM architecture, it also creates a foundation for companies to start building cloud-native services that integrate with the legacy applications, extending functionality and improving customer experience. Managed security, data protection and disaster recovery can also be introduced as wrap-around services to ensure availability, resilience and performance.

Keeping core systems going with the reassurance of DRaaS

One supply chain logistics partner was running many mission-critical applications on legacy systems in very disparate places. Their core business applications were running on a mix of AIX and IBM i on IBM Power Systems located in different data centres for production and DR, with escalating costs and multiple issues with legacy applications. Protecting these systems was a high priority. To reduce its data centre costs and secure its legacy apps for the future the business wanted to move to a hosted model. One possibility was to simply relocate its existing systems to data centres operated by a third-party hosting provider. While this approach would address the data centre footprint, the legacy issues would need to be resolved through costly upgrades. The company was already adopting cloud services for x86 systems and wanted to take advantage of cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and DR as a Service (DRaaS) for its core systems, as an alternative to re-hosting the existing systems. By switching to the CSI PowerCloud performance and availability would improve and costs reduced by 40% over two years. The CSI PowerCloud provides IaaS capacity for six IBM i LPARs and two AIX LPARs together with 22TB of storage. High availability and DRaaS are provided by real-time replication between two separate sites, and the company benefits from 24x7 support which means its core applications are consistently monitored and managed. Allowing for business growth without additional infrastructure outlay

FNZ is a leading independent software vendor (ISV) providing innovative wealth management solutions. It offers clients a fully integrated front-to back-office solution with a web interface for client and agent access. In a traditional Fintech ISV model, the client would be responsible for the underlying IT environment, but FNZ wanted to increase its client base by removing the need to purchase additional infrastructure and conduct regular upgrades to run its applications.

It adopted a model based on a managed hybrid cloud environment that’s resilient, accessible, and highly secure. The business could then offer clients an Infrastructure as a Service model that can adapt as clients’ business grows.

Figaro, one of FNZ’s core financial applications, runs on IBM i on IBM Power Servers. FNZ selected the CSI PowerCloud to host the Figaro application, which is based on the latest IBM Power Servers as well as Windows and Linux-based virtual machines, together with tiered storage and data protection services.

The second challenge was to find a cost-effective solution for software testing to improve the speed with which FNZ’s developers could roll out new releases. CSI offered FNZ a ‘Test as a Service’, an offering based on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in the IBM Cloud.

FNZ now has a test-ready environment with as much compute power as it needs. It can spin up new virtual servers in approximately 10 minutes. Its developers can also complete tests up to 15 times faster using the virtual servers for as long as they need and deleting them after use.

The real benefits of the cloud can be obtained for everyone

There are many ways of using a service provider’s PowerCloud to transition or modernise much more smoothly. This allows organisations to cut ties with costly in-house legacy infrastructure, while providing access to the right skill sets and the latest and greatest version of the technology on a consumption basis. This means that the real benefits of the cloud can be obtained for everyone.

Andy Dunn, Chief Revenue Officer, CSI Ltd Andy joined CSI in 2021 having previously been with Daisy Group for five years. Andy is responsible for Sales, Marketing and Commercial engagements at CSI and has a wealth of knowledge about the cloud and how to help organisations improve their business outcomes in the cloud.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by CSI .