9 Questions to Validate Your Legacy Modernization Vendor Before Starting the Cloud Migration Process

Before starting working with someone and giving them your trust, you should do thorough research to establish whether the company is worthy of your trust. Validation of a legacy provider helps ensure that the vendor is legitimate and will maximize your profit instead of making you lose your shirt. A legacy vendor is someone who understands your needs and requirements and is capable of providing the necessary services. 

Why It’s Important to Validate Your Legacy Vendor

But why are we talking about it? Does the cloud migration process fail very often? Is conducting a thorough investigation and pinpointing the vendor’s strengths and weaknesses an ambitious task that will take up quite a lot of time and effort? Is it worth the trouble? Let’s take a look at the latest statistics about cloud migration:

• The migration process to the cloud is a long and bumpy road: 73% of such projects take at least one year to accomplish;
• The planning of the migration process is difficult, and the deadline assessment fails almost every time: 96% of businesses that went through the process exceeded their planned timeline and budget expectations;
• Sometimes the migration process can be so complex that companies give up altogether: roughly 74% of businesses said they moved their software back on-premise when they realized they failed to achieve the expected results. 

Since the failure rates are so high, a reliable partner to accompany you through the process’s pitfalls and challenges is essential. A legacy IT vendor is someone who will help you decide which data to move and which to leave behind, integrate your legacy system into the cloud, as well as take up the entire process of migration, from planning to completion. Here is the list of questions to ask a legacy vendor during the interview for successful hiring.

Can You Perform a Proof of Concept?

The goal of the Proof of Concept (POC) is to test the functionality of the application after the legacy modernization vendor moves it to the cloud. PoC should be significant enough to test the basic features and critical points of the system. AWS suggests starting with a small database, launching and removing instances, and putting the system under stress. 

How to test a legacy codebase without breaking anything? Learn here. Testing Legacy Codebase: What is, Common Problems and Best Practices

• Security ensures confidentiality, integrity, and availability;
• Testability shows the ability to identify failure modes;
• Modifiability entails the processes of system changes and how they are being executed;
• Usability serves as an attribute that measures user experience and satisfaction with the application.

A small tip from the ModLogix team

In order to maximize the positive outcome of PoC, establish the aforementioned criteria prior to launching PoC.

Why do so many companies decide to move to the cloud? 5 Reasons Companies Move to the Cloud and What Prevents Them from This Step

Does the Migration Process Imply System Enhancements?

This brings us to the question about the benefits of migration. 

• Faster deployment. By migrating to the cloud, you eliminate processes like buying servers and installing operating systems, which shortens the deployment times and allows you to launch your apps quicker and more frequently. A good legacy vendor will take care of the server-side issues allowing you to concentrate on your business goals. 
• Enhanced security. Although you will still need to protect sensitive information, cloud providers help you keep your data safe. They conduct automatic security updates to make sure your data is protected from common threats. Make sure your vendor has enough experience with your business area — healthcare, insurance, eCommerce, and so on — to apply best practices while protecting sensitive data.
• Continuous monitoring. Cloud providers offer automatic monitoring and notifications when your system experiences issues or stops performing. 
• Scalability. When you move to the cloud, you can scale up or down easier and quicker. Instead of paying for the features you no longer need, you can rapidly adjust to meet your current business goals and save money.
• Accessibility. A vendor will help you move parts of your data or all of it to the cloud, making it accessible regardless of the physical machinery, which opens up new business growth opportunities.

Do You Conduct Risk Assessment?

First of all, the vendor will identify every potential risk and categorize them based on their impact: business, organizational, and technical risks. Second, the legacy provider will conduct the risk assessment and divide them into different levels of severity: low, middle, and high. Based on this assessment, the actions will be established: low risks can be simply monitored, middle and high risks – mitigated, possibly eliminated, or transferred. 

If a vendor is not planning to perform a thorough risk analysis, it jeopardizes your company’s reputation, which is not a good sign.

Does Your Migration Process Include Refactoring?

Refactoring is one of the most common approaches when it comes to cloud migration. Most legacy application modernization providers offer refactoring as a way to proceed. It involves rebuilding the architecture of the application to fit the cloud computing environment. A legacy vendor will rewrite parts of the codebase to ensure better flexibility and take full advantage of the perks that come with cloud storage. At ModLogix, we provide the refactoring service to almost all cloud migration projects we work on, as it helps scale the system in the future.

Legacy code is a minefield. Learn how to optimize your code base with this guide. Legacy Code Refactoring: Tips, Steps, and Best Practices

Your vendor should be experienced enough to be trusted to modify your code, test it, and avoid possible issues with functionality. In the long term, refactoring will pay off and provide the highest ROI of cloud migration. 

Do You Execute the Migration of Databases as a Part of Cloud Migration?

A report made by Gartner, one of the biggest firms in IT research, estimates that 75% of databases will be moved to the cloud by the year 2022. Although the benefits definitely outweigh the risks, it is a complicated part of cloud migration and poses many challenges, so many providers avoid this step.

Your legacy app modernization vendor should be knowledgeable and experienced enough to successfully execute the cloud migration of your database. A good vendor should aim for downtime reduction and protection of your data during the process of migration. 

ModLogix realizes the full value and the importance of database migration as it gives you access to a large pool of database management systems, offers scalability, and reduces costs. When migrating the WebForms platform from on-premises to Azure, we faced a problem with different time zones that caused a total mess with record making. Our engineers rewrote 140 procedures stored in the database and the source code to convert everything to EST time zone, and the system started making records correctly.

Learn how to upgrade legacy databases and avoid data loss. Legacy Database Migration: Effective Data Migration Plan

Do You Provide a Rollback Plan or Is It a One-Way Migration?

In case the migration goes unsuccessfully or unexpectedly, a rollback plan becomes very important. A good vendor should be able to perform a rollback in case you’ll need to abort the migration. Below are three basic strategies you should consider while migrating to the cloud:

• Basic fallback. In this case, the system will lose all new transactions and go back to its original state. This strategy is quite rare due to its extreme approach.
• Dual write. This is the most time-consuming approach that requires you to write transactions to both databases at the same time. Although the rollback is easy to do, it involves a lot of complex modifications to the application.
• Fall forward. This strategy requires the creation of a replica of the original database which is synchronized with the new database. In case of a rollback, you stop writing to the new database and continue with the replica.

Did you know that a rollback plan is an integral part of the cloud migration strategy? Guide to Cloud Migration Strategy Process

Can My Team Complete Some of the Migration Work Internally?

In other words, can you, as a vendor, cooperate with my team? Although many companies choose to delegate this task to a third-party company, some have their in-house department that can participate in cloud migration. 

ModLogix is a software development company that can assist you in the cloud migration process. We believe that we can help you significantly decrease costs by improving your infrastructure and moving your app to the cloud. We can work autonomously or together with your team to execute each step of a successful migration process:

• Discovery phase, where we define the objectives;
• Planning, where we design and review infrastructure;
• The development, where we build the new infrastructures;
• Validation, where we assess security compliance, network, and storage;
• Migration, where we conduct the process of migration;
• Ongoing management and monitoring, where we continuously offer technical support and proactive monitoring.

How Will Cloud Change Management Be Handled?

Cloud change management differs from the on-premise one for many reasons. First of all, cloud environments are built for agility, which means that changes will occur faster due to autoscaling. Having components and licenses at your hand, the changes can be made quickly, within a couple of clicks. Cloud change management makes setting up new environments easier and rolling back changes quicker.

Top-10 main advantages of cloud computing that take your business to the next level. 10 Key Advantages of Cloud Computing for a Business

Do You Provide a Cost Analysis for Cloud-Hosted Solution Compared to On-Premise Solution?

According to a survey conducted by Gartner, one of the most frequently asked questions by cloud migration is whether the cloud is really cheaper than on-premise.

The cost analysis estimate is very difficult to conduct as it depends on the system’s specifics, number of servers, server’s costs, and many more. Sometimes, going serverless is actually more expensive for a company than staying on-premise. However, it is not impossible to calculate the difference when provided with all the essential information. Greg Deckler, the Vice President at Fusion Alliance, has conducted his own estimated analysis and posted it on LinkedIn.

A trustworthy vendor will provide you with a comprehensive analysis, weigh the pros and cons, and recommend the best option for your case.

Our Experience

We at ModLogix understand and value the importance of the criteria we have covered in our article. ModLogix is a company that helps businesses move their data to the cloud. We will accompany you at every step, from the discovery phase to ongoing monitoring after completion. Having substantial experience in cloud migration of varying complexity, we will provide you with comprehensive information and answer every question that may arise.

Our recent successful project was all about the migration of a large-scale system made with Webforms to the Azure environment. The whole process was challenging as the legacy solution was incompatible with cloud requirements while some of the system parts didn’t work properly in the cloud. Read this true and dramatic story from our team.

Contact the best specialists at ModLogix to receive a consultation and begin your migration as soon as possible. 

Conclusion

As risky and challenging as cloud migration can be, it is becoming a necessity, not an option. Cloud computing ensures flexibility, cost reduction, automatic updates, quality assurance, and improved security. However, finding the right legacy application modernization vendor is also an essential part of a successful transition. Ask the questions, read case studies, and make sure the vendor is worth your time and money.

How to jumpstart an app modernization process? Follow these steps. Creation of Effective App Modernization Roadmap: Everything You Need to Know