Strategy for Migrating Legacy Applications to Cloud (SoMLAC)

Abstract: Any modern business utilizes a number of IT-solutions for its day to day functions, for example accounting, resource planning and human resource management. This often requires large investment along with high maintenance costs, even after this these systems become obsolete and require to be updated with further capital investment. This also forces businesses to focus on solving problems which are not related to their core business areas. It is because of these problems that businesses wish to move away from managing large data centers of their own and to migrate these legacy applications and operations to the cloud. The few migration methods which exist are insufficient to be used for migration of legacy systems to the cloud infrastructure. There is a lack of research proposals in this field which focus on the problems which an organization encounters and needs to resolve while migrating legacy application to the cloud. Some of these factors are (1) Data segregation and security in a multi-tenant environment, (2) Application availability, (3) Application as well as data portability within cloud, (4) Effectiveness of different architectures (functionality and cost). The goal of this thesis is to develop a cloud migration strategy which shall help an organization to systematically identify the changes which the legacy application requires in its architecture and design before it can be migrated from existing in house IT infrastructure to the cloud. It is to help organizations in planning, decision making and migration of their legacy applications to the cloud. The thesis presents a migration strategy called Strategy for Migrating Legacy Applications to Cloud, SoMLAC. Research made to develop this migration strategy is qualitative and consisted of the development of a preliminary strategy based on interviews, literature study and system observations. The preliminary strategy was later refined with the help of interviews and action research. The final SoMLAC strategy consists of three migration phases where during the first phase organization migrates its legacy application to the cloud infrastructure, while in the second phase the strategy helps the organization to develop a platform for migration other legacy applications. The third and final phase helps an organization to transform these legacy applications so as to become services which can be used by other organizations. SoMLAC also contains SoMLAC compliance checklist which helps an organization during initial planning and decision making process. The checklist can also be used to validate if a cloud application meets the obligations that an organization has towards maintenance of its customer information.