Legacy Applications Automation

As businesses face growth and expansion, they also face the problem of legacy system integration with new technologies, web applications, mobile applications as well as in the cloud. Legacy systems are old, inflexible technologies put into place to resolve previous business challenges. These systems, because of their long lifespans, tend to be fragile, obsolete, and difficult to integrate with new cloud and web-based services. The established legacy systems such as COBOL programs running on Mainframes remain in use by companies because legacy system replacement is an extensive and expensive process. Many enterprises are concerned with cloud integration security, as integrations between on-premises and cloud solutions often deal with sensitive data. Another concern with legacy system integration is high availability.

We at EndurAI have 30 years of combined experience of our experts who have worked on most of the technologies that are evolved in the last two decades. We have experience in delivering integrated enterprise-class solutions that are highly scalable, reliable, and available. You can trust the depth, breadth, and width of variety of enterprise applications that our experts worked on and confident that we deliver successfully with at most care.

Enhancing legacy enterprise applications with Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Speech Recognition, and multi-language translation. Please contact us for more information on how we can deliver top-class legacy integration and bring them to the automation world.

Many companies or institutions still possess legacy non-x86 systems in their datacenters: mainframe, midrange, or UNIX proprietary systems. Migrating these workloads across hardware architectures to modern cloud platform, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud requires advanced software technology. Short-term migration approaches mainly use hardware emulation, middleware emulation, automated refactoring, or middleware replatforming. This post highlights short-term migration options, their key technical differences, as well as their differentiated benefits. These options are particularly suited for custom home-grown applications running on a legacy platform where the complete source code is available. On the other hand, third-party packaged applications generally require discussing with the third-party software vendor for modernization options to AWS.

Short-Term Migration Options

These migration options result in shorter project duration for faster return on investment (ROI) and quick wins. The diagram shows, for each option, components that change and components that stay the same during the migration of the non-x86 legacy platform.

Our services cover following specializations

  • Legacy Hardware Emulation: The hardware emulator replaces the legacy hardware but the legacy operating system (OS) and applications stay the same.
  • Legacy Middleware Emulation: The middleware emulator replaces legacy middleware APIs and OS APIs required by the application, allowing for porting. The majority of the application source code is recompiled without changes, with some adaptations for changed dependencies.
  • Legacy Automated Refactoring: Code, data, and dependencies are automatically converted to a modern language, data store, and frameworks while guaranteeing functional equivalence with the same business functions.
  • Modern Middleware Replatforming: This applies only to modern languages, middleware, and runtimes that are available across legacy and x86 systems such as Java, PHP, and relational databases. It allows for the reuse of the application code and databases.

Differentiated Value Propositions

Each migration option has its preferred use-cases and unique value proposition, relevant for a specific legacy workload. Considering an average-sized workload with a few million lines of code, the diagram below shows key differentiating characteristics, like project cost, project duration, and cloud agility, as represented by the Cloud-Native Maturity Model. This model promotes use of AWS Managed Services, Twelve-Factor App design principles, Microservices, and automation such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).

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Migration Approach

There is no one-size-fits-all for legacy modernization and automation. Customers need the right tool for the right job, aligned with both the IT strategy and legacy technical constraints. Because of the technical complexity, any approach definition must include a hands-on technical Proof of Concept confirming if the approach and tool recommendations are viable. When considering an assessment for a legacy workload migration, the following deliverables facilitate the decision process:

  • Inventory of assets to be migrated
  • Complex PoC proving technical viability
  • Detailed description of the migration approach
  • Phased project plan for complete migration
  • Cloud/Infra sizing and project cost estimates
  • Business case for legacy migration including ROI