The cloud computing is picking up. With cloud architecture, not only software but also platform and infrastructure would be available as a service. The advantage of cloud computing which includes reduced cost, increased storage, flexibility, easy maintenance and more mobility are very well known facts, especially with the giants like Google, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft as providers and focused in this space. With this huge advantage of low TCO and higher ROI, the organization have started shifting their application strategy towards cloud computing. As we all know cloud is an architecture, mainly for web-based applications that provide on-demand computing power. In 80’s legacy applications were the trend and later in 90’s client server applications on Visual Basic, Oracle forms and Powerbuilders took the place before web based applications. Today more than 40 billion lines of code is driving the enterprise applications and products.
How these legacy applications would work on cloud? Should organizations use virtualization technology to expose their legacy application on cloud or re-write the legacy code to run natively? In terms of business, migration of legacy/client-server application to cloud would be a huge business segment and there are technology companies who have already started investing and focusing on this niche area. While offering expertise on cloud services using Microsoft Azure will not be a challenge at Octaware, migrating the existing web based solutions with a quick turnaround time would require building a smart tool and strategy.
Here is a white paper by a Microsoft partner who is an early entrant in migration segment which addresses the questions above –
-Aslam
