Solving the Problem of Migrating Legacy Applications to the Cloud

This is the first post in a series focused on accelerating digital transformation with a global file system.

As more and more large organizations implement their cloud-first digital transformation, a common roadblock is migrating their legacy applications.

Applications

As anyone in IT knows, application inventory and application rationalization are a critical piece of any IT transformation. Your users have certain patterns of collaboration and basic performance expectations, so you have to preserve your existing applications and the way they work. You also need to maintain the flexibility to deploy additional applications or move them.

I’ve worked with many organizations that have tried accelerating this shift by spinning up file servers in the cloud to provide file services for on-prem users or applications, but it never really works because performance suffer dramatically. Applications and users expect performance and access levels as though the data is local. This is one of the reasons global organizations undergoing cloud-first digital transformations have chosen UniFS^®, the Nasuni cloud-native global file system. While UniFS, and all associated application data, lives and scales in the cloud, physical or virtual edge appliances cache active files locally. This way, end users still enjoy a familiar, high-performance experience.

3 Benefits of Modernizing Legacy Applications with Nasuni Cloud File Services

Nasuni’s global file system also allows organizations to:

1. Globalize Application Data
   Traditionally, files are stored on local hardware and available only to applications in a single site. Nasuni centralizes all file data in the cloud and makes the most recent versions of files available to any application or location globally with the proper credentials. For example, files uploaded to a branch office in Los Angeles quickly become available to an application housed in a central location in New York.
2. Lift and Shift Applications
   Instead of forcing IT to rewrite apps for the cloud or putting the application server in the cloud and having it reach out to distant sites to access data, Nasuni simplifies the process of modernizing legacy applications. Once application data is migrated to cloud storage, organizations can lift and shift their applications to the cloud, and then they are immediately local to the data.
3. Accelerate App Development & Delivery
   With Nasuni’s patented UniFS global file system, new applications, software packages, or code can be developed and tested according to a “follow-the-sun” collaboration model. A new build developed in one spot can quickly be validated by a QA team on the other side of the world. As one workday ends, another begins, and the development cycle never slows.

Digital Transformation with a SaaS Solution

Nasuni is designed to make moving an application or workflow to the cloud easy, while maintaining the way your apps and end users work today. Organizations are finding they can reduce their reliance on data centers using a Nasuni SaaS solution, save money, plus keep their end users happy at the same time.

That’s a real IT win.

If you’d like to learn more, download our latest white paper: 6 Reasons to Accelerate your 2019 Digital Transformation with a Global File System

You can also review this whiteboard video talk on data center consolidation.