Businesses across the globe spend trillions of dollars on IT services and maintaining their enterprise applications (apps) and software. They have to spend a considerable amount of their IT budget on simply maintaining the infrastructure they’re using to run their businesses.
However, you can drastically cut down on these maintenance costs if you modernize your current apps and software and move them into a cloud infrastructure such as Microsoft Azure. This can help you increase your company’s productivity while also cutting down on your IT costs.
In this article, we discuss how you can modernize apps to Azure cloud and its specific benefits for your business.
The following are some of the key facets in which Azure Cloud can help you overcome some of the most prominent challenges of legacy applications.
• Security: Microsoft Azure includes strong security protocols that can protect your organization and prevent leaks or hacks.
• Cost: Cloud-based apps are far more reasonable because they can utilize the cloud’s existing features for scalability. The cloud already incorporates resources such as Database as a service (DBaaS), Containers-as-a-service (CaaS), and other infrastructure that the app may need. So it serves as a single managed infrastructure that can handle everything, which can reduce the cost of managing and maintaining your apps.
• Recovery: Cloud apps aren’t invulnerable and they are also prone to temporary failures of operation. However, Azure cloud incorporates app development techniques that include recovery protocols so you can easily recover from downtime or failures.
• Auditing: Cloud apps also include monitoring features such as Azure App Insights. These features and tools allow you to easily access audit logs so that you can debug or audit applications.
• Portability: Azure cloud also includes Linux or Windows containers with which you can move your applications from one cloud to another or between different environments. Docker hosts and containers protect your applications from the friction that occurs during deployments.
• Compliance: Azure cloud and other similar cloud providers understand that customers must achieve compliance with regulatory bodies. That’s why they include regular compliance updates.
• Storage: With Azure cloud, your enterprise can easily store large data sets and retrieve them easily. This is crucial now that most businesses have vast volumes of data and IoT to contend with, making reliable data storage and retrieval essential.
There are various strategies that businesses can use to migrate their legacy apps to the cloud. The right approach will depend entirely on your business needs. However, the following is a brief overview of cloud modernization strategies concerning Microsoft Azure.
• Cloud Infrastructure-based Applications: This strategy includes the migration of your on-premise apps to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. This is also known as a “Lift and Shift” migration because the apps will have the same composition, but are deployed to the VM.
• Cloud Optimized Applications: This is a strategy in which you don’t have to change or modify your applications’ current code considerably. You can still gain access to cloud-based benefits because of technologies like containers and other cloud services.
• Cloud-Native Applications: This is the ultimate cloud migration strategy for businesses that want complete modernization for mission-critical apps. At this stage, the apps often have to be rewritten and re-coded entirely, but it gives you access to all of the cloud-based benefits and services.
Microsoft Azure is a completely scalable and cost-effective means which businesses and enterprises can modernize their legacy apps and migrate them to the cloud. The benefits of migrating to Azure cloud are multifold as it can increase your application’s security and functionality while also reducing end-to-end app lifecycle costs. However, you have to carefully analyze your business needs and priorities to make sure that you’re using the correct migration strategy.
