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Blog Summary:
This guide takes you through the key benefits, common challenges, modernization strategies, and migration steps to ensure a seamless migration of legacy applications to the cloud. With clear cost understanding and migration approaches, you will be able to make informed choices whether you are modernizing a single system or planning an enterprise transformation.
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When your legacy system slows you down, it is no longer an IT problem; it becomes a business issue. At least 70% of IT leaders say outdated systems drain their budgets and slow innovation. You might have experienced these issues firsthand through bottlenecks, outages, and the continuous pressure to do more with less.
Moving your business to the cloud isn’t just an upgrade; it is a strategic shift that helps reduce risks, improve performance, and open new opportunities for innovation. It is a practical, future-ready path to bolster scalability and stability while remaining cost-efficient—especially when you choose to Migrate Legacy Applications to Cloud as part of your modernization efforts.
In this guide, we will walk you through the essentials of migrating legacy applications to the cloud. It will help you make confident decisions, avoid costly missteps, and upgrade without disrupting your business.
With legacy application migration, you will migrate your older, slow, and high-maintenance system to the cloud. Even if you are aware of the basics, it is helpful to revisit the concept and understand what it really solves. Most of the bottlenecks you are experiencing can be traced back to these ageing systems.
However, if you are new to this idea, think of it as a crucial step that can give your system a fresh start without tearing everything apart. Consider a situation where your billing system runs on a ten-year-old server tucked away in a corner room. It crawls during peak season and needs a patch every other month. You might be experiencing troubles during outages, especially with backup.
By migrating the billing system to the cloud, the legacy application scales, performs well, and remains secure, eliminating the continuous performance issues.
At its core, migration is about freeing your business from legacy limitations and moving to faster, more innovative systems.
Before you commit time and budget to cloud migration, you must know what you will gain from this move. Understanding the benefits of cloud migration helps you see the real value behind the transition. Here is how shifting your legacy systems to the cloud can improve your workflows and operational efficiency.
With cloud-based applications, you can streamline your daily operations. You don’t need to scramble to fix hardware issues or struggle with slow, outdated systems. Cloud automates your routine tasks, enhances performance, and lets your team prioritize strategic work rather than mundane tasks.
If your legacy system is draining your budget, cloud services may help you save more. You go from higher upfront expenses to more flexible pay-as-you-go pricing strategies. With cloud, you will no longer pay for idle servers, surprise outages, or ageing equipment. Instead, you will invest in what you will actually use.
Outdated systems come with outdated security. Cloud platforms have built-in protections such as continuous monitoring, encryption, and automatic patching. You can include them in your application without any effort from your team. It will reduce risks and increase your peace of mind.
Whether you want to scale up during peak seasons or launch a new feature faster, cloud environments can adapt instantly. This extends the agility that you missed with your legacy systems.
The modern cloud environment can connect with your APIs, new tools, and even SaaS platforms. As a result, you will be able to enjoy smoother workflows, fewer manual steps, and increased opportunities to innovate.
By migrating your application to the cloud, you can reduce your environmental footprint. By using energy-efficient infrastructure, cloud providers operate responsibly and grow their businesses sustainably.
Get a clear, step-by-step cloud migration roadmap to modernize your legacy system without operational disruptions or costly rework.
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Before you dive into a cloud migration journey, you must understand the hurdles you are likely to experience along the way. By knowing these cloud migration challenges upfront, you can make informed decisions without surprises or rework.
Most legacy systems are built as a giant monolithic block. In this case, every feature is intertwined. So, when you wish to change a small component, you risk creating a ripple effect. To migrate these systems, you need to break them into smaller and manageable pieces. This requires planning, patience, and the right approach.
Most legacy systems depend on hardcoded configurations, IP addresses, and outdated libraries. These hidden dependencies can cause issues during migration. It can slow down and even block your path. You must identify these dependencies and refactor them before proceeding with cloud migration.
Legacy technology may not be compatible with cloud environments. They may use unsupported operating systems or old databases. That’s why you must know what can be taken as-is and what needs to be modernized before proceeding.
Moving large datasets containing sensitive, mission-critical information requires accuracy. You must ensure there is no data loss, corruption, or duplication occurring during migration. It is equally important to sync data with minimal downtime. All this adds complexity during migration.
Your legacy system may expose vulnerabilities you didn’t know existed during the migration of outdated systems. You may risk introducing vulnerabilities and other security issues into the cloud if the legacy system isn’t patched or properly encrypted. It is crucial to strengthen security before moving ahead with cloud migration.
This is a financial project, not a technical one. Without a proper scope and plan, you may end up escalating costs. It could occur due to extended timelines, unexpected changes, or underestimated resources.
If your team doesn’t have requisite experience with cloud-native tools, containers or DevOps practices, you may experience a steep learning curve. You should always begin the journey by upskilling the team or partnering with experts.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to moving your legacy system to the cloud. The 6 Rs of cloud migration can help you select the right approach that fits your app’s complexity, value, and scalability needs.
This is the fastest option, where you move the application as-is from on-premise to the cloud. There are no code changes or refactoring involved. It is ideal if you want quick wins and to reduce data centre costs.
In this case, you will make small optimizations. They include switching to a managed database or adding cloud-native services. You won’t modify the core architecture. It results in better performance and lower maintenance.
This is the deepest part of modernization, where you redesign the application while fully leveraging cloud-native capabilities such as containers and serverless. You need more time to complete this process. However, it delivers long-term agility and scalability.
In this case, you replace your legacy application with a new SaaS product. This way, you don’t maintain your custom system. Instead, you buy new and adopt a modern platform that operates in the cloud.
While migrating, you might find applications in the legacy systems that no longer serve the purpose. You can retire them to reduce clutter, lower costs, and simplify the architecture. Fewer systems indicate better management.
You may not need to migrate all systems or applications immediately. Some systems might be risky, while others may add complexities. You can retain them temporarily to prioritize the offers that deliver the most value to your business.
Migrating your legacy system to the cloud can be overwhelming. However, breaking it down into clear steps makes the journey manageable. Here are easy-to-follow and practical steps to proceed with confidence and clarity.
Start by knowing what you are working with. Assess the application’s existing architecture, performance issues, and dependencies. With this step, you will know what can make the move easy and what requires more attention.
The purpose of migration is important before you begin coding. You should be clear if you want to reduce costs, improve performance, or boost security. These goals will guide the decisions that follow.
Based on your detailed assessment and goals, select one of the six Rs: rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retain, or retire. Each application follows a distinct approach.
Each cloud platform from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud brings a distinctive strength. You should align your choice with the workload needs, budget, your long-term strategy, and your team’s skills. You should always pick the one that aligns with your needs.
Map out the resources needed, rollback plans, timelines, and success metrics for your project. You should have a detailed migration plan that prevents surprises while remaining flexible and adaptable.
This is the point at which you will break your monolithic architecture into microservices. With modernization, you can ensure your application is fully scalable and reliable.
You should migrate your data to the cloud using secure, validated migration tools. With thorough performance testing, integrations, and user flows, you can ensure no vulnerabilities enter the new environment.
Once deployed, you must monitor the performance, costs, and usage patterns. Using this data, you can fine-tune configurations and scale resources while optimizing for efficiency.
With the right tools, you can ensure your cloud migration is faster, smoother, and less stressful. Here is a quick look at the tools you can use at different stages of your migration journey.
This is a central dashboard that lets you track everything from application discovery to the migration process and tools across AWS workloads. You gain complete visibility into the process, so that nothing slips by you.
If you use the Microsoft ecosystem, you can get detailed assessments, dependency mapping, and server discovery, along with step-by-step migration guidance, with this tool.
This is a streamlined service that automates VM and application migration into the Google Cloud with minimum downtime. This tool is great if you want to accelerate the process without refining the architecture.
It is known to deliver real-time replication with near-zero downtime. This tool is great for migrating the mission-critical systems that can’t afford downtime.
You cannot talk about cloud without infrastructure-as-code. With this tool, you can provision, update, and even manage the cloud resources using code. This extends repeatability and reduces configuration drift.
This tool optimizes costs while enhancing resource efficiency. You can improve cloud workloads and avoid over-provisioning with this tool.
This tool provides excellent, real-time visibility into your app’s performance, infrastructure health, and user experience before, during, and after migration.
This is a simple, reliable tool that lets you securely migrate large volumes of data to cloud services with minimal effort.
Know dependencies, identify bottlenecks, and choose the apt cloud architecture with expert cloud migration experts to make the move risk-free.
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Migrating to the cloud isn’t just about moving your legacy system; it is also about modernizing the app so that your teams can work faster, scale better, and innovate without any constraints. Here are the top modernization techniques to incorporate during migration.
If you want to make the systems compatible without rewriting the legacy system, you can use API wrapping. It connects the current functionality to cloud services via modern APIs, enabling your new services and UIs to seamlessly interact with the old system.
This method is great for handling monoliths. Instead of rewriting the entire legacy system, you can gradually replace the specific features/functionality with cloud-native components. Over time, you will gradually replace old functions with new ones without disrupting operations.
Whether you are moving from on-premise SQL servers to cloud-based databases or adopting NoSQL, modernizing the app involves unlocking performance and cost benefits. It will remove the need for manual backups and maintenance, thus enhancing your team’s efficiency.
Serverless reduces the need to manage servers, thus reducing the clutter. You will pay for the compute you use, and applications can scale seamlessly. This is useful when handling unpredictable workloads.
With continuous integration and delivery pipelines, you can deploy the changes faster and safely. During migration, you must set up automated testing and deployments to ensure updates reach the cloud reliably.
Modern cloud apps require in-depth visibility. With integration logs, metrics, traces, and real-time dashboards, you can detect issues early and optimize performance for long-term reliability.
When budgeting for the legacy-to-cloud migration, costs can vary significantly. However, with actual numbers and estimates, you can plan your migration with confidence.
On average, you will spend anywhere between $20,000 and $250,000 on cloud migration. The actual cost will depend on the size, migration complexity, and modernization needs expressed by your organization.
If you are planning to migrate a small or moderately complex legacy system, you can use the lift-and-shift method. This will cost you somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000. The cost will include everything from discovery and basic rehosting to cloud setup and minimal code changes.
If you plan to replatform your application, move managed databases, add APIs, and optimize the architecture for the replatform. This will cost between $60,000 and $120,000.
Full refactoring or re-architecting the legacy system involves breaking the monolith into microservices. It also includes adopting serverless and modernizing the data layers. This can range from $120,000 to $250,000+. This is especially useful for the enterprise-grade systems.
Data migration will cost between $5,000 and $50,000. This will depend on the size, downtime constraints, and security needs. Beyond the migration, cloud adoption involves recurring costs like storage, compute, monitoring, and support. Most businesses will pay 20-40% less in infrastructure costs post-migration than with their on-premises system.
With better app performance and reduced maintenance overhead, most companies recover their migration costs within 12-24 months.
A smooth migration isn’t just about selecting appropriate tools; it is also about following the best practices and guardrails. Let’s understand the standard habit to follow to avoid disruption and minimize risks.
Security shouldn’t be an afterthought when planning a migration; it should be introduced early in the planning. You must define access controls, encryption policies, and identity management, along with compliance requirements, before moving data and workloads to the cloud. By getting this right, you can prevent painful fixes later.
Manual processes can slow down your migration and add errors. You can implement automation tools that help with provisioning resources, managing configurations, validating environments, and deploying code. This will accelerate migration and set your system up for long-term operational efficiency.
Start with a low-risk application or module before you move everything to the cloud. The pilot project helps you test your strategy, know the gaps, and refine your approach. It will also ensure you don’t hurt the business-critical systems.
Once you have migrated the workloads to the cloud, visibility is crucial. You must monitor performance, availability, and customer experience in real time to catch issues before they affect customers. This approach will also optimize the setup as your usage grows.
If you don’t keep costs in check, they may spiral out of control. You should review resource allocation, scale down unused instances, and utilize reserved pricing. By staying vigilant, you can save a lot of money.
Your migration will be successful only when the people managing it understand it thoroughly. That’s why you must invest in upskilling your IT and development teams. They should be adept with cloud-native practices, tools, security, and automation. With well-trained teams, you can reduce errors and gain the full potential of your cloud environment.
Choosing the right cloud migration partner can help you attain success. That’s where Moon Technolabs stands out. With extensive experience in modernizing legacy systems, our teams evaluate your architecture, select the right cloud migration strategy, and execute it, avoiding guesswork and risks.
We provide end-to-end support from assessment through implementation and optimization. Our team will support even after deployment, providing continuous maintenance.
Whether you are handling complex monoliths or planning a complete modernization, we bring technical depth, proven processes, an agile approach, and reliability to the table. As a result, you can migrate to the cloud reliably and accelerate your business’s digital transformation journey.
Migrating your legacy applications to the cloud is no longer just a technical upgrade; it is a strategic move that will define your enterprise’s ability to scale, innovate, and stay competitive in the landscape.
Using the right approach, appropriate tools, and appropriate guidance, you can overcome the limitations of your legacy system and achieve better performance. It will also bolster the system’s security and extend long-term efficiency.
Having a great partner can ensure a successful cloud migration journey and make it risk-free. Moon Technolabs has delivered several successful cloud migration solutions. Reach out to our team today to take the first step towards a modern and future-ready cloud ecosystem.
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Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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