Let’s start with some industry examples where companies across the world have been working with legacy systems as they are critical to their business.

• Mainframe systems that airline companies use for reservations and ticketing systems
• Command-line interface systems based underwriting engine used by insurance companies
• Companies with a core platform on legacy systems (such as COBOL, DB2, etc.) and being used by numerous customers

Many companies are generating good revenues from their operations and supporting the business, but they are missing out on the opportunities for connected data across the ecosystem. The architecture is not supported for enabling seamless data porting, scalability, and speed. Moreover, these systems have a higher cost of operation and high maintenance; and are plagued with usability and security issues. Technological obsolescence and resource scarcity are a few more challenges.

Key challenges with the Legacy systems

Integration issues with other systems: Gone are the days of monolithic architecture; nowadays, solutions are designed to have benefited from multiple systems connected via APIs. Modular and SOA-based architecture are common with scalability benefits and integration with other 3rd party systems. Legacy systems are not designed to integrate with other heterogeneous systems and thus cannot achieve fully integrated systems.

Go to market is slower: Legacy systems usually follow the waterfall model of software delivery, and aligning with the market demand of releasing software features on the fly is not feasible.
These systems are heavily focused on a manual way of working with little or no integrations available for 3rd party build, configuration, and CI/CD tools, causing the entire process to become slow and error-prone.

Misalignment with customer requirements: In the current era of a customer being the king, legacy systems are not synchronized with customers’ needs, especially in terms of flexibility, agility, usability, and customer experience. Legacy systems are still tightly coupled with OS, interface, screen, etc. In the case of growth, these systems cannot scale at the same pace as that of business.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning: Legacy systems are not built to integrate 3rd party data sources and are relatively inflexible. When the world moves towards NoSQL, a flat-file kind of database, legacy systems still run on relational DBMS, slowing the entire operation. Creating intelligent dashboards analytics is a cumbersome task, if not impossible, in these systems. These systems cannot harness the power of AI/ML and achieve predictability and digital transformation benefits.

Human resource challenges: The availability of skilled resources with expertise in legacy systems is seeing a decreasing trend. Universities and institutions, nowadays, focus more on newer technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, Internet of Things, Intelligent Automation, Blockchain, DevOps, etc. This means the engine to produce the team with legacy application skills is dying; moreover, the new generation of engineers is inclined to work on the latest technologies and not on legacy ones.

Compliance and Regulatory requirements: Nowadays, regulatory authorities and governments are very keen on adhering to compliances or heavy penalty is imposed on them. HIPPA, SOX, PCI, GDPR, etc., require your technology to be current and aligned with the regulations. These rules demand specific data to be shared with government bodies, and their implementations/modifications are very time-consuming in legacy systems.

Solutions to legacy technology challenges

We understand the challenges legacy technologies pose, like speed bumps, to leverage data modernization and use it to achieve higher revenue and innovative offerings at the utmost speed to enhance customer experience.

The question is, how can we resolve these legacy issues?

Digital transformation is the key to reducing the risk and unpredictability and improving the customer experience in the current market.
The implementation of Agile and DevOps coupled with a technological revolution comprises cloud, IoT, and AI/ML with enriched and interconnected data that will resolve the issues mentioned above.
Each organization is unique in the context of a market, customers, products, ecosystem, etc., so there can’t be an umbrella approach. The approach must be customized to different companies to harness the full benefits of digital transformation.

How can IGT Solutions help you?

With its technological expertise and process champions, IGT Solutions is well placed to implement methodologies and achieve a faster delivery cycle, cost optimization, and excellent customer experience.
IGT’s expertise in transitioning from legacy to cutting-edge technologies in a phased manner does not disrupt the ongoing business engagements. It can easily transition into the latest technologies fitting to customers’ needs. IGT’s expertise in Agile, DevOps, Cloud, and experience in implementing AI/ML, IoT, and Blockchain will help you ensure a smooth journey from legacy to latest technologies.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

The post Modernization of Legacy Systems appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Building applications from scratch can be beneficial. It gives the flexibility to develop customized solutions specific to the organization’s requirements; this approach can sometimes backfire as the time to go live and achieve competitive advantages in the market may be delayed. Moreover, there can also be inherent technical debts which might remain unresolved due to other pressing priorities from time to time.

Another approach would be to have best of breed solutions where few or more applications or modes in the overall solutions are procured as Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products.

The cloud policy of the organization may demand to move all the applications from on-premise to the cloud. It becomes difficult to move the solutions to the cloud for the heterogeneous solutions, where few components are COTS products and homegrown components.

Challenges in migration of cloud applications having COTS components

Many products are still in the process of having an authentic cloud version, especially if these applications have been in operation for several years and their vital licensing patterns are tied to hardware. These applications may become a hindrance to the cloud transformation journey for an organization. We need solutions for getting these applications to migrate to the cloud to realize cloud-based solutions fully. Service companies have also developed customized solutions to move COTS applications on the public cloud infrastructure, and few COTS vendors have created SaaS-based offerings.

Following are the few challenges companies encounter while transferring solutions with COTS applications to the cloud:

• Challenges associated with COTS applications which are highly dependent on underlying hardware for licensing and operations.
• End to end system showcasing higher latency when moved to the cloud.
• Technical challenges arising out of the existing architecture of shared storage, multicast and 3^rd party integrations.
• Non-availability of cloud approved version of a product.

These challenges become more severe considering the below objectives of cloud transformation:

• Cost optimizations
• Reducing maintenance
• Higher availability
• Better user experience

Need for migrating COTS to cloud

Organizations understand the need to have their applications available, anytime, everywhere, to everyone. There are definite benefits of moving its applications to the cloud (public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud) in terms of cost, availability and focusing on its core business.

Organizations are moving their COTS applications to the cloud, namely to:

• Achieve agility for the organization’s application landscape
• Enable automatic provisioning and DevOps for the organization
• Removing dependence on hardware, especially end of life servers
• Increase resiliency and enable disaster recovery capacities for mitigating risks
• Consolidation of data centers
• Reducing maintenance costs on tools, on-premise hardware and personnel

Following are the typical phases of migration of COTS applications to the cloud:

• Analyzing: Analyze product functionality, configuration, interfaces, infrastructure, data storage, as well as security and data privacy.
• Planning: Decide on target architecture in the cloud, compatible cloud services, cloud type and service provider, process and approach for migration, data identification, interfaces, DR requirements, and infrastructure capacity. Finalize monitoring plan, KPIs and alignment with business goals.
• Migration: Iteratively execute migration plan with data, applications, and interfaces. Ensure post-migration testing results align with expectations and the critical KPIs are aligned or are better than pre-migration workflows. Conduct end to end testing, performance and security testing to ensure migration has no adverse impact on the application’s functional and non-functional areas.
• Optimization: Continuously monitor, calibrate and fine-tune COTS application post-migration to the cloud to ensure its alignment with business requirements.

Assurance for Cloud Migration

A well thought out cloud testing strategy is essential for assuring smooth application migration to the cloud, as legacy functional and regression testing methods will not be aiding value here. In addition to practical aspects, organizations have to plan mitigation plans for availability, performance, latency, and security.

The risk of application failure or cloud server overrunning cost is the preeminent risk, which can be mitigated with a cloud-centric testing plan.

We recommend the below approach for cloud migration assurance:

• Analysis and planning: Planning the various phases of testing, coverage, test oracle, resources and scheduling.
• Pre-migration testing: Comprise baseline testing in existing applications and create benchmarks for functional and non-functional KPIs.
• Migration Execution: Providing validation during the migration process for different types of data and records from source to target.
• Post-migration testing: Ensure validation of end to end tests with respect to benchmarks of pre-migration testing. It covers functional, integration, performance, security, resilience and disaster recovery scenarios.
• Monitoring and maintenance: Covers post-go live testing, parallel run for a specified period, and resources monitoring.

These steps ensure a smooth transition to the cloud and mitigate the risks of application failure and performance degradation.

Conclusion

IGT Solutions helps you with faster, smoother, secure and cost-optimized cloud migration assurance for your business-critical applications.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

The post Cloud Migration Assurance appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $396 billion in 2021, Additionally, by 2026, Gartner forecasts that the cloud market will take over 45% of overall IT spending on system infrastructure, and application software, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Organizations, to stay relevant in the current dynamic markets, need to continuously innovate and deliver a differentiated value to their customers. With the adoption of the cloud, businesses can focus on innovation by harnessing the benefits of the digital environment, scalability, faster time to market and cost efficiency.

While there are various stated benefits of migrating applications to the cloud, there are inherent challenges as well if due diligence is not done.

Challenges in cloud adoption:

Data security: Security is of paramount importance considering the ever-increasing threat vectors. Additional security measures are needed and due planning is required before migrating to the cloud. The user credentials, cloud services provider’s security controls, and patch management play an important role in ensuring cloud security.

Following are key enablers to achieve security in your cloud journey.

• Designing base security controls to develop secure landing zones on the cloud service provider platform.
• Creation of reusable templates with integrated security controls for a platform as a service
• Integrate operational processes & procedures with enterprise security tools combining platforms and services.
• Create role-based access control and define what access to be provided to each role
• Design policies on monitoring, configuring and change management for platform security controls.

While organizations are adapting their cloud implementations and there are true benefits in terms of making it lighter, faster and more accessible from customer point of view, security risk are also huge. In order to balance the security and speed, companies should continuously work to develop their capabilities on:

• Know your security posture and review it regularly
• Automate native security
• Be proactive with compliance and bring automation in it
• Employ comprehensive security monitoring and response

Service Quality: Organizations put Disaster Recovery systems in place where on-premise systems are involved.  We have seen in the recent past, where major cloud service providers have experienced outages and applications such as Facebook have suffered globally. Hence, we firmly believe it is the cloud provider’s responsibility to move the application to the cloud and assure on availability. Service quality of cloud services can be analyzed on the parameters of autoscaling, performance, latency, availability and responsiveness.

SLAs are to be defined and agreed with cloud service providers on key aspects such as:

• Data privacy
• Data ownership and control
• Service availability
• Quality of service parameters and their monitoring
• Change management process to modify SLAs

Performance: While cloud services are available everywhere to everyone, the experience is not the same for all users, it can differ due to internet speed, network fluctuations and the application architecture design. Performance tuning and configuration play a vital role in achieving optimal application performance generating a great user experience.

Performance-related issues include the geographical proximity of data to the end-user, network speed within the cloud to the external interfaces, speed between computation later and various data stores as well as to the end-users.

Governance: Cloud-based systems provide scalability, agility and faster time to market, on the other side they provide limited control on how infrastructure is provided and operated. Strict governance measures are to be used with agreed upon policies and procedures with cloud service providers, in order to safeguard organizational interests.

Few points to consider for cloud governance:

• Organizations to focus on governing how their employees are using cloud services intending to reducing cloud spending, improving auditability and optimizing security risks
• Perform risk analysis on what can be controlled in agreement with the cloud services provider
• Implement risk controls for cloud service provider vendor management program by continuously monitoring an action plan for identified quality levels.

Cloud adoption is beneficial if augmented with cloud assurance services: With carefully designed cloud adoption and migration assurance covering performance, user experience, and security aspects, cloud migration can be a smooth operation paving the way to achieve digital transformation, innovation as well as agility of operation for the organizations.

IGT’s migration assurance platform provides comprehensive testing services across the cloud migration lifecycle.

Connect with our cloud migration assurance experts to understand more about  achieving  cloud transformation without worrying about the challenges of security, performance and user experience.

Source: Gartner

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

The post Importance of Cloud Assurance for a Successful Cloud migration appeared first on IGT Solutions.