Dealing with Legacy IT Estate While Preparing for Cloud – Invest or Harvest?

Enterprises today are evolving their IT landscapes to align their business and strategic priorities through digital transformation. As they do this, enterprises strive to find a balance between adapting to the rapidly changing ecosystem, customer-driven demand, and maintaining business continuity. The cloud is a key enabler of this transformation, and most enterprises usually undertake either a rip and replace or phased migration with modernization approach in their cloud transformation journeys.

Rip and replace is an extreme approach that requires significant enterprise investment and is applicable only for a few workloads. Phased migration with modernization accounts for a majority of enterprise cloud transformation efforts. Here, workloads are classified into move-now or move-later categories based on applications’ current states and the share of legacy component.

A harvester mindset views legacy applications as aging machines that will soon be replaced and, thus, attempts to gain the most out of available legacy estates. This viewpoint discusses an alternative investor mindset to managing the existing legacy estate that acknowledges the importance of maintaining legacy workloads by making appropriate (financial and non-financial) investments. This approach believes that the legacy estate can sustain longer and will evolve over time. The report concludes by recommending strategies to enable enterprise sourcing decisions for the investor mindset.