An Assessment Tool to Prepare the Leap to the Cloud
To keep software compatible and optimal with respect to the latest trends is not easy. Nearly 90 % of the software cost can be due to maintenance, and approximately 75 % of it is spent on developing new features to stay functionally competitive and releva
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An Assessment Tool to Prepare the Leap to the Cloud Leire Orue-Echevarria, Marisa Escalante, and Juncal Alonso
Abstract To keep software compatible and optimal with respect to the latest trends is not easy. Nearly 90 % of the software cost can be due to maintenance, and approximately 75 % of it is spent on developing new features to stay functionally competitive and relevant. The industry progresses through periods of incremental development interspersed with true paradigm shifts, and, therefore, legacy software must keep up the pace. However, software modernization is not a trivial issue, and, if improperly done, it dangers the business continuity and sustainability. Companies considering transition to the new paradigm of cloud computing need to have available an innovative and combined technical and business analysis on the maturity and prospect of the legacy application. This chapter presents an approach for assessing the maturity of these applications and the convenience of migrating to the new cloud paradigm. Two issues are taken into account: on one hand, the perspectives in terms of technical challenges, maturity, and effort of the migration are identified; on the other, the performance and business benefits in relation to the cost of the process are pre-evaluated before tackling the actual migration process. Perhaps, for the first time, the business value is directly attached to the technical performance. Keywords Migration to cloud • Maturity assessment • Feasibility analysis • Cloud modernization • Legacy software • Multitenancy • Scalability
L. Orue-Echevarria (*) • M. Escalante • J. Alonso TECNALIA ICT – European Software Institute Division, Parque Tecnológico Ed. #202, E-48170 Zamudio-Bizkaia, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Z. Mahmood (ed.), Cloud Computing: Methods and Practical Approaches, Computer Communications and Networks, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5107-4_13, © Springer-Verlag London 2013
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Introduction
New developments in the way services and applications can be delivered over the Internet have opened up huge opportunities for software vendors. The Internet is not only getting faster and thus data is transferred in a quicker manner but it is also becoming more reliable in what concerns transactions among customers and providers. This is making possible the offerings of basic IT appliances such as servers for storage or computing clusters as a service, that is, vendors provide the hardware and infrastructure and clients provide the data. The decoupling of responsibilities accelerates the development of new service platforms and software products. Due to the fact that the innovation rate is accelerating, software products in the Internet era need also to constantly evolve. Take a look, for instance, at the last 5 years and how the way we work has changed. This is due to the breakthrough of cloud computing, smartphones, or social networks, among many other technologies and new app
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