A balancing act: Making legacy systems, on premises and cloud work together
Everyone is talking about the cloud. All of the time. Cloud computing offers numerous well-recognised benefits, from speed, scalability and costs savings.
However, many organisations work with an eclectic mix of inherited legacy systems, handling sensitive and personal customer data, with on-premise, in-house equipment and perhaps some use of cloud platforms. For those ready to embark on their cloud journey – do you really need to place your entire business operations into the cloud to realise these benefits? How do you get the balance right?
Legacy
You may have an internal legacy system that works just fine just where it is on-premise. Moving this system to the cloud – as a lift and shift operation – is often not as straightforward as it sounds. Effectively, these older systems have not been designed to work in the cloud and don’t always have the right functionality. They may require some extensive backend work, such as new coding and more, to get them cloud ready.
It is recommended that establishing your cloud presence first, initially with cloud ready applications, before moving any legacy system to the cloud. And if your legacy solution works on-premise – does it really need moving at all? Consider both the advantages and disadvantages of making this move.
On-premise
Many organisations hold sensitive data, from customer addresses, payment details to patient records. This highly sensitive data might not be suited to storing to a public cloud and would be more secure and protected if it remained on premise. Take the time to assess the potential risk of a security breach – both on-premise and in the cloud – to decide where all your valuable data should reside.
Cloud
Cloud technology has changed. Businesses are no longer obliged to move between cloud platforms but, for example, can bring Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Citrix together in one system to efficiently operate.
We recommend a comprehensive review of your business requirements, data storage and application needs to help you establish not only which apps should go into the cloud, but also the best cloud platform for each business unit.
How to get started
There’s no rush or race to put everything you have into the cloud. Today, more and more organisations are choosing to work with multiple cloud providers to realise their cloud strategies and achieve significant business benefits. Not only that, at the same time, they are also keeping sensitive data on-premise while maintaining older, legacy systems that work in-house.
So how do you decide what goes where?
CloudGO is Trustmarque’s “out of the box” cloud solution. Our cloud experts can help you plan, deliver and migrate to a cloud infrastructure, which meets your bespoke business requirements.
Specifically designed to bring together each stage of the cloud migration journey into a single simple service, you can have a full virtual datacentre with your suitable applications migrated into it and enjoy all the benefits of cloud computing.
We are offering a limited number of free half-day reviews to help identify your organisation’s needs and how you can remove the complexities of moving to a multi cloud-based architecture.
To learn more about CloudGO and to book your free workshop complete the form below:
