Saturday, May 31, 2014

Why Moving Legacy Applications to cloud is important

Cloud Computing is emerging as a dominant approach changing the IT platforms architecture and verifying the increasing business requirements. In addition to being a Service-Oriented, it is also a business model. Accordingly, Cloud Computing compasses a broad spectrum of business, marketing and technical opportunities and issues.

Since the spectacular Dot-com bubble in 2000, companies from all over the world have continued to develop and implement more scalable e-business strategies. They tried to rethink or refine their business models and what they offered to customers. Many newer companies decided to offer services considering internet as a base part of the service. Cloud computing was the right environment to take off as multi-tenant architectures highly prevalent.

Regardless of the long-debate in the recent years about cloud computing efficiency, several companies and government institutions have switched to it. Indeed, cloud computing came with very huge model composed by many layers which made it very flexible. It can be fully or partially adopted by enterprises. Similar to electricity grid, use sharing resource over a network and Pay as you consume model have offered the best way for enterprises to reduce costs related to the IT infrastructures’ supports and enhancements , as well as, an opportunity to minimize risks.

Both business and technical people admitted that cloud computing is a must. Today, cloud services are used everywhere due to the cloud elasticity which helped cloud vendors to parametrize different packs that verify expectations from all kind of business, major accounts and small companies.  According to analysts, Cloud computing market is expected to grow from $37.8 billion in 2010 to $121.1 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 26.2 per cent from 2010 to 2015. By 2020, the cloud computing market is forecast to exceed $241 billion, announces Salesforce.com. The researchers posed several cost-related questions about software-as-a-service (SaaS) to companies that had already migrated to the cloud, but the findings are also relevant to the needs of midsize firms that could be served by the cloud. Smaller firms seek the same benefits that enterprise seeks, including cost savings.

The key issue for enterprises was to find the optimized way to migrate their existing platforms and applications to a cloud-based infrastructure. Obviously, many organization tried to follow an incremental approach to cloud migration. Indeed, migrate to cloud is a big project that goes beyond technical tasks to redefine relationship between business and IT and to re-organise procedures and rules

On the other hand, cloud computing came with multiple advantages for software vendors. The cloud patterns are the main issues that help vendors to maintain and monitor their cloud by respecting standards.

The popularity of SaaS is steadily increasing because it simplifies deployment and reduces customer acquisition costs.In addition, developers can take control easily of the support by managing no more than one version of a product. This approach, called multitenancy, allows companies to scale as fast and as much as needed without replacing costly infrastructure or adding IT staff.
Besides, the subscription-based SaaS pricing model can keep IT budget costs consistent or lower than packaged or homegrown software.

Moving existing business applications to cloud is an important thing to follow up the evolution trend and take profit of technical and functional benefits. This migration can be done by rewriting the application to exploit the cloud features or replacing the application with an equivalent  software as a service (SaaS)  or relocating the application to the cloud environment.