Johannesburg, 09 Sep 2020
Legacy architecture is much like Frankenstein’s monster in that it comprises myriad legacy parts, has limited functionality and is dependent on its maker. As organisations move to the cloud, it is important not to recreate this monster in the cloud.
This is according to Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory and adjunct professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business, who was addressing a Nutanix Connect Series webinar this week, on the challenges of marrying legacy architecture to the cloud.
“Legacy IT evolved over six decades, and organisations have been adding layers and layers of technology and creating interfaces between these systems, with no end game in sight,” he said. “If you analyse the IT budget today – the bulk of it is still going to keeping the monster alive and supporting and extending legacy software, networks and data storage facilities.”
The move to cloud is inevitable, a panel agreed, but panellists noted that research had found that barriers to application cloud migration included concerns over increased risks, concerns that legacy applications would not run on cloud, concerns over budget restrictions, a lack of skills to manage migration and insufficient support from top management.
Singh said in the move to the cloud, organisations had to address applications, integration, storage and compute, together with security, simultaneously. He also noted that this could prove costly initially. “But there is no other option. The journey to cloud is difficult, but necessary, and like any transition process – it will look like a failure halfway through. But organisations need to hang on – it’s always darkest before dawn.”
Panellists highlighted the complexity of refactoring legacy applications for the cloud, saying it required collaboration across a range of high-level skillsets. “A lot more energy must go into planning,” they said. “While agile has been the trend to get things done quickly, moving to cloud demands that we think about things more deeply – from procurement and strategy, through to how the technology is executed.”
Panellists also noted that control panes and automation would be needed to simplify management of multi-cloud environments.
“Refactoring, security and skills will be key,” said Singh. He said in his experience working with banks around the world, there was sudden growing interest in hiring cloud-centric directors and educating the board around the cloud. “Business and product teams are now asking how to use technology and cloud to deliver more value, and how to build business cases out. I’m now seeing more energy than ever seen focused on cloud,” he said.
The next webinar in the Nutanix Connect series will be hosted on Wednesday, 16 September, entitled: ‘Horizon busting – What will the post cloud world look like?’ For more information and to register for this event, click here.
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