Shadow-Soft partnered with Red Hat to host a webinar on migrating applications to the cloud. Shadow-Soft’s VP of Development, John Himebook, shared ideas and use cases on the four common migration models: Lift and Shift, Shift to SaaS, App Modernization (Refactoring), and Replatforming.
Himebook revealed examples and use cases to help you decide why, when, what, and how to move applications to the cloud.
Let’s look at the four cloud migration models and use cases discussed in the webinar:
1. Lift and Shift
Lift and Shift helps you get out of the data center and stop managing hardware. It’s an opportunity to offload from your own bare-metal environment. Take advantage of scalability and performance while reducing your upfront cost.
Lift and Shift Use Case:
- A logistics company’s CIO didn’t have the time or money to break up legacy systems.
- They wanted to move to the cloud, and didn’t need to make any major changes to their applications – just minor tweaks for scalability.
- As a result, the organization could scale infrastructure to peak, paying only for what they used. In doing so, they were able to refocus their IT team and budget on mission-critical applications.
2. Shift to SaaS
Shift to SaaS is a great approach when you want to move the support of non-defining apps to a SaaS provider. Non-defining apps are applications that you need but don’t define your business and take lots of valuable resources. As Himebook states, “You are in business because of these solutions, but these solutions are not your business.”
Free up your IT team to focus on innovation by applying this model.
Shift to SaaS Use Case:
- A large manufacturing organization was tired of struggling to manage their email.
- They migrated to Office 365, passing all the support and maintenance responsibilities to the service provider.
- The service provider – Shadow-Soft in this case – became their mediator so their IT team could be free to focus on customer-facing and floor applications. The migration was done overnight to minimize impact on the end customer and employees.
3. App Modernization
App modernization, also known as application refactoring, is a migration model used in situations where you need specific applications to benefit from the speed, agility, and innovation of the cloud.
App Modernization Use Case:
- A utilities software company was stuck in a legacy system. It was taking them days to do minimal changes and months to perform major changes for their customers.
- They identified specific applications that could benefit from the cloud, then developed the difficult modules while training their staff how to use and support these modules.
- As a result, the company changed their marketplace and expanded to become a global provider.
4. Replatforming
Replatforming is for organizations that want to embrace all benefits of the cloud across the entire enterprise board, making IT a critical function of the business. This is for companies that want to benefit from scalability, elasticity, resiliency, and high availability. Replatforming helps ensure you are future-proofed to respond to changing market conditions.
Replatforming Use Case:
- A medical company needed to link their old legacy systems with their new mobile application.
- They migrated their old systems to a cloud-native platform, so they could take advantage of all the benefits of the cloud.
- As a result, customers could now book appointments faster and easier.
- Doctors could also have much more information on the patient prior to the visit, which resulted in better and more efficient use of the physician’s assistance.
Can the Cloud Benefit Your Company?
Taking advantage of cloud computing allows you to get closer to your customers, move at the speed of the market, and focus your team on innovation.
Customers today want everything done in minutes. They want instant gratification, and as a company, you must be able to adapt quickly to meet their changing needs.
Moving to the cloud gives you the speed and flexibility you need to engage with the changing market.
Watch the on-demand webinar
Need assistance designing your cloud environment? Or recommendations on the best migration model? Request a cloud assessment with our cloud team.
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