Legacy to Cloud

Legacy applications are particularly good candidates for cloud transformation. In addition to the standard cloud computing benefits, there are many compelling reasons to modernize legacy applications:

1. The ecosystem of programmers and support personnel with experience in legacy development tools such as COBOL, PowerBuilder or Visual Basic is shrinking rapidly.
    
2. The hardware that legacy applications run on is difficult and expensive to maintain.
    
3. The effort and expense required to maintain existing systems prevents them from innovating new business processes, products and services.
    
4. Modernizing legacy applications to the web can make them available to new groups of users such as customers, partners, off-shore employees and others. This can create new opportunities to improve customer service, cut costs, or increase sales through self-service.

In the July 2010 report by Gartner, Inc., entitled “Signs Indicate a Train Wreck is Coming Unless You Modernize IT,” CIOs are advised not to continue hiring more programmers to keep old systems running, but rather, “fund an IT modernization/application overhaul program.”  The consequences of not modernizing are increasing support costs and ultimately, the loss of IT and business agility.