Legacy and the Cloud: Old and New

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Applications Delivery   Business Case   Cost Management   Information Technology   Strategy  

When newer firms go into cloud computing, they have a distinct advantage over established organizations. Amazon, successful as one of the leading cloud service providers across the globe, evolved from its sapling roots to become a pioneer in this direction--its commercial cloud service has made a strong impression on the Web services world. Google, another easily recognizable brand name, has leapt ahead of many companies affiliated with large investments in cloud computing, itself spending billions of dollars to keep expanding its presence and plans for the future.

Organizations that have IT history, however, are more likely to have legacy systems to support--making their integration of cloud computing a much greater challenge.

Cumulo Nimble
As is the situation with many technological advancement projects that have come before, legacy systems are hard to modernize without indulging in a costly and labor-intensive reconstruction and rewrite. Regardless of the technologies they represent from years gone by, many do not have the capability to expand their abilities from their inherent design. Some prosthetic approaches--such as attaching front-ends and interfaces or enhancing functionality with add-ons--have been used in the past in order to provide a semblance of current technology. But these smoke-and-mirror approaches are often mere illusions and don’t …

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