Scott Jeschonek, Director of Cloud Solutions at Avere Systems, thinks that although oil and water don’t mix, legacy and cloud do. Despite the hype about moving applications to the cloud and about turning legacy applications into cloud natives, he finds that legacy systems are alive and well, and he believes they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon: “Though the cloud promises the cost savings and scalability that businesses are eager to adopt, many organizations are not yet ready to let go of existing applications that required massive investments and have become essential to their workflows.”
Complexity and Challenges
Jeschonek adds that rewriting mission-critical applications for the cloud is often inefficient: The process is lengthy and costly in financial terms. Unexpected issues can also arise from moving applications to the cloud, but they will vary from one firm to the next. At the top of the list is the challenge of latency. “Existing applications need fast data access, and with storage infrastructure growing in size and complexity, latency increases as the apps get farther away from the data. If there isn’t a total commitment to moving all data to the cloud, then latency is a guarantee,” he writes.
He mentions other challenges in his DatacenterDynamics article “Unlike Oil and Water, Legacy and Cloud Can Mix Well,” including mismatched protocols and the amount of time required to rewrite software applications to conform to cloud standards. With regard to mismatched protocols he says legacy applications typically employ standard protocols such as NFS and SMB for network-attached storage (NAS). They’re “incompatible with object storage, the architecture most commonly used in the cloud.” To many, this fact makes moving to the cloud a daunting prospect, but it needn’t be.
Find out more, read the complete article. By-lined to David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks. Client: Trudy Darwin Consulting.


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