Summary: More and more enterprises are migrating legacy systems and applications from data centers to the cloud as part of their transformation efforts, aiming to leverage the security, scalability, efficiency, or availability of cloud computing resources.
However, at times, it may make more sense to migrate applications from the cloud to traditional data centers or on-premise infrastructure.
Which applications can be migrated, and when does migration make more sense?
More Options with Hybrid Infrastructure
The value of hybrid infrastructure lies in the flexibility and ease of scalability it offers, as well as governance and control over on-premise infrastructure.
Sometimes, applications need to be migrated to data centers to take advantage of their ease of use. With hybrid infrastructure, IT teams can make decisions based on their needs.
Modern hybrid enterprises are already prepared for adopting and deploying infrastructure and applications across environments to ensure the continuity and sustainable development of their applications, thereby maintaining their competitive edge.
Factors to Consider When Implementing Application Infrastructure
When choosing managed infrastructure options, key considerations include application architecture, data security, and the availability of computing and network resources.
Certain applications may need to run in an on-premise data center, while disaster recovery may take place in the cloud to leverage its flexibility and agility, avoiding business disruptions and customer impact.
If a custom application meets any of the following use cases, migrating it from the cloud to an enterprise’s private cloud environment may make sense:
- Mission-critical business applications that are heavy and continuous consumers of computing resources (e.g., memory, CPU).
- Applications that require sustained high connectivity and higher network bandwidth from the cloud environment.
- Applications that need higher accessibility and data security.
- Customers that need to retain data or frequently access legacy data.
- When building applications in the cloud first and then using a migration plan to move them to a private host after procuring data center facilities.
As cloud computing offers a pay-as-you-go model based on resource usage, applications that continuously consume computing resources and network bandwidth may be too expensive for public clouds compared to private cloud hosting, which provides an appropriate visual environment and modern networking and security systems, with skilled resource monitoring and management.
The Ongoing Value of Data Centers
Depending on product strategy, roadmaps, and service delivery requirements, enterprises may find themselves good candidates for on-premise application hosting. The benefits include:
- Cost control for management, monitoring, and maintenance. Sometimes, the total cost of ownership for certain applications is cheaper than cloud computing.
- Better access and control over data, which helps protect intellectual property and improves application security parameters.
- Enhanced application performance and availability through better visibility and management of systems.
- Improved access to evolving technologies to modernize and enhance systems without relying on the availability of specific cloud services.
- Avoidance of vendor lock-in with specific cloud providers.
If any of these criteria apply, enterprises should review their migration plans for business and application needs.
Migration with Minimal Disruption
The best candidates for cloud migration are applications designed with modularity in mind. These applications do not rely on customized underlying infrastructure. Microservices architecture is well-suited to handle use cases like this.
Ideally, custom applications should be built using modern microservices architecture to ensure maximum flexibility, without relying on serverless technologies or cloud-specific services like RDS to avoid cloud platform lock-in.
Considerations for Traditional Application Design: Migrating traditional legacy applications to the cloud without a modern architecture generally won’t lead to significant cost savings or increased flexibility. This is why enterprises are using cloud-agnostic microservices architectures to simplify their application design, maintaining the necessary flexibility and agility to migrate back to on-premise data centers with minimal impact on customers, which is crucial.
Beware of Pitfalls
As with any digital transformation initiative, challenges may arise. Applications that leverage cloud-specific services and APIs may encounter migration issues due to customizations or provider-specific features.
Enterprises lacking technical resources or appropriate infrastructure (such as modern data center technologies) may face challenges in maintaining performance and availability.
Equally important, this migration may not make sense for cloud-native businesses. These companies have never owned data centers or had the necessary resources to manage these transitions or provide global, secure access with high availability and performance.
For such enterprises, public cloud will continue to be the go-to, but adopting modern microservices architecture is essential to avoid cloud provider lock-in and facilitate migration between infrastructure options. This approach ensures that the organization’s business can run more effectively in a hybrid environment.