No matter the scope of your cloud migration initiative, setting a roadmap for your journey is mandatory. According to IBM, A well-thought out roadmap doesn’t stop at covering the technical requirements for such a journey, it “ensures that each cloud decision the company makes to solve today’s needs will continue to pay off in the future.” A cloud migration is not only a journey, it’s also not where new revenue will be found. That comes after migration, once application modernization can truly begin. Without a comprehensive cloud roadmap at the start of your journey, future revenue targets are a lot less likely to be hit.
There are countless resources that offer advice for creating complete cloud roadmaps, and they all largely focus on using a clear understanding of your business to help prioritize what to migrate—in what order—and what to leave on-premises. Many recommend making these decisions by looking at each workload and determining just how mission-critical it is to the business, and asking, “Does it generate significant value?”
Oftentimes, those apps that deliver the most value are monolithic, on-premises, traditional applications. Due to years of baked in complexity and integrations, the thought of migration may seem like such a daunting task that IT operations leaders hesitate to even begin charting a roadmap or strategy around these applications.
But this response fails to introduce the advantages and opportunities for modernization that cloud-native technologies and services offer not just to greenfield applications, but traditional applications as well. Many of these applications run on IBM’s AIX operating system on Power Systems hardware, and are, therefore, not always the first to be considered as strong candidates for the cloud.
Since typical public clouds are unable to migrate business-critical applications running on AIX unchanged, it’s no surprise these applications have largely remained on-premises. The rewrites and rearchitecting that standard clouds require—and their associated costs—increase the risk of disrupting existing lines of business. While there is some truth to the fact that “not every application is right for the cloud, statements like “most legacy systems are poor cloud candidates” incorrectly include applications that are a perfect fit for the cloud. Especially a cloud that was purpose-built to handle the complexity of traditional enterprise applications.
Skytap Cloud is designed to do precisely what other clouds cannot—migrate traditional applications running on AIX, and then enable teams to provision AIX environments on-demand in a self-service manner. IT organizations in healthcare, government, financial institutions, and telecoms, struggle to accelerate innovation around AIX-dependent applications due to familiar on-premises infrastructure constraints. But by migrating AIX applications to the cloud, and providing end users with self-service access to environments, IT gets the most out of their existing investments, while enabling teams to deliver greater agility and test coverage than any other cloud can provide.
As you chart your own cloud roadmap, don’t only look at each AIX workload and ask, “Does this generate significant value?” or automatically assume, “It’s not possible to move this workload to the cloud.” Follow it up with, “Could it generate even more if I could move it to the cloud, unchanged, today?” and know that with Skytap Cloud, you can.
Learn more about how Skytap Cloud helps enterprises innovate faster by rapidly migrating AIX workloads and other mission-critical applications to the cloud.
