The cost of maintaining custom legacy applications is on the rise. It instigated the presence of a large number of low-cost application servers, which can be used for migration of these applications to other platforms, thereby helping in reducing the cost of ownership.
When it comes to legacy application migration, the organisations normally focus on three things and they are quality, cost and speed. All these three criteria are in fact interdependent and any change in one impacts the other two. It simply means that if you want a high-quality job then you need to shed more money and it will take more time. Similarly, if you migrate quickly then quality will be compromised and so on.
Let us see some tips that help in balancing these criteria in the best possible way.
- Be Proactive and Consolidate: You need to be really aggressive while rationalising your application portfolio. The fewer applications you can have by either pruning or consolidating the portfolio, the better it will be for migration. It is because fewer the number, faster the migration and less the cost.
- Quick Decision: Once you feel the need for migrating, you need to make quick decisions. If you take too much of time, the whole exercise of assessing needs to be redone unnecessarily, which in turn needs both time and energy.
- Define Your Parameters: You need to clearly define what you expect on quality front as it can be subjective. You might be the one who would like to have particular info displayed right at the top or you may define quality by enabling the users to navigate to the site with the minimum possible clicks. Thus, it is important that you define what quality means to you.
- Find All Hidden Costs: While you might know about the upfront cost, there are many other costs that are associated with the migration process. These may include costs associated with running a proof of concept or modify or create a new application platform. So, find how much it will cost to you in total and then take the call.
- Start Slow, Stabilise and Then Run: The approach to migration should not be a 100m sprint. Here you need to start slow and get a hang of things by migrating of some simple stand-alone applications. Once you are confident enough, go for the core business-critical applications. If you start with the critical applications, you sure will be in trouble. The pace of migration should be the one that your users can support and manage without any trouble.
- Embrace the Change: When you move to the new application platform, there will be many new features. You need to embrace them with open hands. You also need to prepare your users for the change in advance so that they don’t feel left out.
It is always critical to maintain a fine balance between the cost, speed, and quality but the above tips will help you achieve it.