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As organizations become increasingly comfortable with cloud native and DevOps technologies, they have begun using the cloud for newer systems—but moving legacy systems currently on-premises to the cloud still makes them uneasy. 

Over the last two years, the “lift and shift” approach—the idea of taking legacy systems and solutions and moving them to the cloud as-is—has been widely discussed throughout the technology professional community as a possible approach to cloud migration. Consider this: what would happen if you lifted and shifted a virtual machine (VM) to the cloud? Other issues aside, you would miss out on all the benefits cloud architectures have to offer, such as scalability, resiliency, and performance.

While DevOps teams want to migrate legacy systems to achieve the level of performance and scalability benefits cloud offers, these systems need to undergo a lengthy, time and labor-intensive rebuilding effort to recreate the systems using cloud-native services. Or do they?

Don’t Rebuild—Rethink

In general, organizations do not want to “mess” with old, legacy systems. However, as tech pros and business leaders understand the benefits of cloud, the desire to migrate services increases. For example, businesses with a billing or accounting system built in the 1980s or 1990s—before modularization was in the picture—or other similarly antiquated infrastructure are eager to modernize, but rebuilding the system function by function may seem like the only option.

However, a new architecture recently entered the fray and has since given tech pros the opportunity to simplify and streamline redesigning legacy systems for the cloud. Enter: service meshes.

Service meshes offer a new way to think about legacy systems if an organization wants to refactor and redesign them to run in the cloud. With a service mesh, tech pros don’t need to build an app in the cloud on their own; they can take advantage of the services that are already built into the cloud platform, even accelerating their ability to rethink legacy systems and enabling them to take advantage of everything cloud has to offer.

Additionally, instead of rebuilding what’s already in place, tech pros should decide exactly what they need the app to do and figure out how to do that with the tools available through the newly adopted cloud platform or environment. As an example, if an organization needs an online billing system that can generate statements and integrate into Salesforce, they would not need to build many of the functions themselves. They could choose components that already offer these capabilities. There may even be an opportunity to extend the capabilities of the legacy system into areas they may not have considered, such as integrating their billing functions with a customer success management platform. The possibilities are nearly endless with “rethinking” an application.

Transforming Internal Processes

Rethinking often leads to shifting internal processes, which is almost always the biggest bottleneck to the cloud migration process. Change is often forced; if a legacy system is built with software or components that are no longer supported, or on platforms that have become obsolete, a company may need to redesign or come up with different ways to deal with the legacy system. If the way data must flow in and out of it are no longer compatible with other systems in the organization, it would force a change, as well.

But when you start rethinking something that isn’t already “broken,” suddenly, the hurdle becomes business process change—and this is where things get tricky. At this stage, implementing the actual technology is not usually the root of any problems. Rather, getting siloed departments such as accounting or HR to enact business process changes becomes the issue in the adoption process. There’s no “quick fix” for getting disparate departments to “hop on the technology upgrade train,” but tech pros can work together to help streamline and encourage modernization across their entire organization.

Start Small, But Know Where to Start

Making the case for cloud is certainly easier when an executive decision-maker is on board, but tech pros and DevOps teams working to convince leadership to change business practices can use their position in the organization to help initiate this change. Realizing that there’s no such thing as a technology initiative—only business initiatives with technology components—is a starting point for change. Embracing this mindset puts IT on the “right” side of the conversation.

To get started, tech pros should make small changes that will have a large impact—choose functions with executive visibility, or services/systems that are particularly expensive or difficult to maintain. After the positive impact of the change is felt, managers will develop an appetite for similar improvements and support larger initiatives in the future.

Conclusion

Experiencing all the benefits cloud has to offer—scalability, resiliency, performance, and more—can completely transform business practices. Rethinking rather than rebuilding, transforming internal processes, and implementing incremental changes that have significant benefits can enable tech pros and business leaders to work together to experience the benefits of cloud without the headache or time-consuming and complex processes often associated with migration. All this leads to successful rearchitecting of legacy systems for a cloudy world.