It wasn’t long ago that many believed that public cloud’s benefits were largely limited to greenfield application development. New applications would be developed, tested, and deployed in the cloud, but, traditional applications—due to their size and complexity—remained in physical datacenters. And while a majority of enterprises continue to keep these mission-critical workloads on-premises, that number is shrinking.
Skytap CMO, Wayne Morris, recently commented on a ZDNet article where a Capgemini survey taker not only suggested leaving traditional applications on-premises, but also, to “let them die in their own lifecycle” rather than attempt cloud migration. While certainly an unpopular belief, it was likely based on the fact that in most public clouds, migrating traditional applications doesn’t make sense. Public clouds often require rewrites and rearchitecting before migration. This laborious process can cost millions in time and budget, while risking disruption to the lines of business these apps support. You don’t avoid that cost and risk by simply letting an on-premises app “die”—not when there’s an easier, safer, and more cost-effective option
Skytap Cloud allows enterprises to migrate traditional applications unchanged—including those with x86/VMware and POWER/AIX components. This accelerates migration so enterprises can begin modernizing these applications with the technology, architectures, and services formerly believed to be only available to cloud-native applications.
When charting a cloud roadmap, rather than simply asking, “Can these applications be migrated?” Morris suggests enterprises dig deeper, and ask, “Where will my applications be most successful, and what’s best for my business?” Skytap Cloud’s unique benefits—especially for workloads previously thought of as poor candidates for cloud migration—can help you answer those questions.
Accelerated Innovation
Skytap Cloud takes an “environments-first” approach to cloud infrastructure that prioritizes removing the bottlenecks and constraints typically found around on-premises infrastructure. By enabling IT to provide self-service access to resources, even globally distributed teams can practice agile development and testing in parallel. This results in higher quality releases with shorter release cycles that meet accelerated business demand for innovation.
Learn how Veritas completed a disruption-free cloud migration of 10,000 VMs and enabled 3,000 global end users in less than 50 days.
Optimized Spend
As enterprises in every industry look for opportunities to remain competitive, reducing annual IT spend is often one of the first requirements on the list. Public cloud offers the opportunity to greatly reduce the budget going to physical datacenters, but preventing cloud sprawl is equally important. As John Townsend at Talkin’ Cloud writes, “(Cloud) cost becomes increasingly difficult to control since infrastructure resources are likely being underutilized.”
Skytap Cloud goes further than reducing IT spend, by providing IT organizations with controls that provide greater visibility and optimize utilization. Idle infrastructure—and its associated overages—are eliminated when teams have the ability to suspend or auto-suspend environments when not in use.
Self-paced Modernization
As mentioned above, traditional applications shouldn’t be “left to die” on-premises. But, it doesn’t make much more sense to lift and shift them to the cloud—and then leave them there as-is, either. Cloud migration alone doesn’t make traditional applications “more successful.” That comes after modernizing infrastructure by then modernizing those applications’ development processes and architecture, iteratively, at the best pace for your business. Existing investments in these apps aren’t abandoned, they’re leveraged alongside new technology and methodologies. These “hybrid applications” enable organizations to preserve the most valuable components of traditional applications, and then build on their foundation by introducing new cloud services.
Most forward-thinking enterprises are now looking to the cloud for modernizing traditional applications long before they’ll ever “die in their own lifecycle”. Hybrid applications don’t trade existing investments for new spend; they provide a maximum return on both.
