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What to Consider When Migrating Legacy Applications to the Cloud

When hearing the word “legacy” in the IT industry, it can often be associated with “out of date, old, or slow.” Outside of IT, legacy is a positive: it refers to something of value or great importance — something that’s part of your history.

While “legacy” isn’t commonly referenced as a positive in the IT industry, there are still positive attributes of legacy, such as in applications. With important data, algorithms, and business processes, legacy applications reflect the historical value of this information. So, when discussing legacy applications, how does cloud migration come into play?

Migrating legacy applications to the cloud is about preserving the historical value of applications as well as adding value to them by moving them from a static, non-cloud location to a cloud-native platform, such as EdgeReady Cloud rapid application development platform - powered by AWS. 

In the following blog, we’ll dive into the common types of applications for SAP ERP commonly used across several industries, how cloud technology results in optimal efficiency of applications, and why migrating legacy applications to the cloud is the best way to utilize any app. 

Common Types of Applications Used in Supply Chain

Enterprise corporations are always looking for ways to decrease costs and figure out how to make their internal processes more efficient, especially those along the supply chain. This includes corporations in the oil and gas, manufacturing, construction, or logistics industries.

Applications used in these industries provide real-time analytical systems that manage the flow of product and information throughout the supply chain network. But what are some of the most common types of applications throughout these industries and how is the cloud used in supporting them?

Demand Forecasting

According to Predictive Analytics, demand forecasting is considered one of the most important requirements of the supply chain. Every company wants to be able to forecast supply and demand because this allows room to plan for an increase or decrease in production and supply, adding to the efficacy of a business’s processes and optimizing ROI. 

So, why is the cloud beneficial for demand forecasting applications? Migrating this data to the cloud allows information to be collected and unified. This could be information or data from customers, retailers, or even producers. Analytics can then be performed on the data for accurate forecast generation, which helps companies plan ahead for the future.

Logistics

Another common application used in supply networks is a logistics application. When there’s poor logistics within a corporation, it could mean the downfall of even the best supply chain. An efficient logistics application can help to create space for future expansion of a business. Migrating any kind of logistics application to a cloud-native platform can help by providing tracking operations, automatic inventory management, and transport route optimization.

Warehouse Management

Warehouse management applications help to manage the day-to-day operations within a company. Pushing these applications to the cloud can help to increase efficiency by eliminating the need for infrastructure or operational overhead of a warehouse team. Inventory or product tracking is also a plus of moving applications to the cloud. As an example, EdgeReady Cloud was able to provide a streamlined way of building warehouse applications for Toray, while supporting the ability for forklift drivers to look up inventory directly on an iPad.

Cloud Migration: The Best Way to Use Applications

There are multiple benefits to migrating your legacy applications to the cloud. Migration advocates for the modernization of legacy applications, while greatly reducing infrastructure costs and improving scalability and efficiency. Below are some more detailed reasons why cloud migration and legacy modernization is the best way to use applications:

    • Real Time Visibility: Because so many things are always happening at once within a corporation, an overload of information can easily occur. Migrating legacy applications to the cloud can ensure the happenings within a company are well monitored and accounted for. Real time visibility of changes will help you improve operations overall.
    • Intelligence and Automation: The cloud can greatly improve the analytics and cognitive intelligence of your legacy applications. Insights into opportunities can be harnessed and potential risks can be spotted. Automation also gives way to operational efficiency.
    • Improved Scalability: With legacy applications, it can be burdensome to move to new environments and can involve huge capital costs. The cloud helps to decrease these costs that come with maintaining an expensive datacenter and manpower needed to support it. New infrastructure can be pushed to data centers across the globe with the click of a button.
    • Speed: Migrating legacy applications to the cloud also increases the speed at which operations are performed and enhances responsiveness to potential increase in demand.

How the ERC Supports App Development & Relationship to Cloud Providers

So, how does EdgeReady Cloud support legacy migration and legacy modernization? What is EdgeReady Cloud’s relationship to cloud providers, like AWS?

EdgeReady Cloud provides a low code, rapid application development tool that allows for legacy applications to be modernized and migrated with little-to-no programming, as well as accessible and fully functional within an online or offline environment. EdgeReady Cloud uses cloud scalability, resiliency, and security to further support the modernization of legacy applications and making it easy to migrate SAP to the cloud. 

Using the power of AWS, EdgeReady Cloud also extends business applications such as SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft to remote places with or without connectivity. Legacy applications that have been modernized within EdgeReady Cloud can also scale to any number of users and load in seconds with no infrastructure or people overhead for internal IT teams, and AWS enables this ability. This a game-changer is any business, allowing for improved efficiency and automation, along with reduction of costs.

Learn how to identify ways to enhance your speed to market with application development using tools like EdgeReady Cloud. Receive a free 30-day trial of EdgeReady Cloud today and build unlimited apps at zero cost - contact our team to learn more.

Cecilia Santis

Cecilia Santis

Cecilia is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Pillir and loves to write about emerging technologies.