Common Obstacles to Converting Apps to the Cloud
I wouldn’t wish rain on anybody – especially not from the cloud, or the promise of cloud computing.
But I wanted to share five hurdles in getting apps to run on clouds, from a recent article I read. Again, I know it’s a bit negative, but I think it’s good to be aware of these issues as the hype about cloud computing gets louder.
1. No one cloud platform is like the other; expect conflicts. Each cloud is different; specific migration, support, cost and capacity issues vary from vendor to vendor. Legacy apps have a lot of integration issues with your other systems. Usually, the integration has to be fast, and there’s a lot of direct database calls from one application to another. That may not work well when one app is outside the perimeter. Beware.
2. Security: the locks on clouds aren’t as fully tested as those on legacy apps. And many companies need to know who is using the apps or accessing the data and whether they’re authorized or not. Also, a multi-tenant cloud is not an option for firms with security or compliance concerns – because the monitoring and control tools have not been addressed. Perhaps a private cloud is the answer for those firms, but they still don’t offer a detailed audit trail that firms rely on to meet financial or privacy regulations.
3. Licensing and interoperability concerns. Neither major software vendors nor cloud providers are making migration of legacy apps easy. They’re built with databases, communications or data-translation modules, etc. So that means vendors like Oracle, Siebel, SAP and others would have to change their licensing to support cloud computing’s model, for instance, paying only for capacity that you use. Legacy apps typically also don’t support the latest technology – except in the user interfaces that aren’t part of their cores, and that’s exactly the technology on which cloud platforms are built.
4. Do you know what’s behind your legacy apps? Chances are, no. You may know your company’s line
of business apps, but not necessarily the endlessly-customized codes, interfaces and forms. Many times, you’ll need specially designed development, analysis and conversion tools to extract data, business logic and security information from legacy apps so they’ll run on the cloud.
5. Migration is mostly manual; few tools will help. Even at their best, the above tools only convert a portion of apps and data, and that leaves the end-user or service provider to deal with the rest. Solutions are in the works, though.
Here’s the link to the complete article on obstacles to converting apps to the cloud.