Modernising and moving to the cloud

Cobol in the cloud is not pie in the sky, says Mark Haynie

Little consideration appears to have been given to how the cloud will affect the core legacy applications run in most of the world’s large organisations.

In many cases, these systems have become integral parts of the businesses they represent, having grown with them over a number of decades and adapted to their individual needs.

In their current state, these applications will not allow CIOs to reduce capex as per the cloud computing promise.

Many will be looking in coming years to migrate these important applications to cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure. This does not have to be difficult or compromise application performance.

IT professionals are managing increasingly complex environments, often containing several applications running on all sorts of platforms.

All applications should be prioritised for modernisation and cloud migration according to business value and cost versus impact and business case.

Pay-as-you-go for cloud is not dissimilar to the interdepartmental charge-back of computing resources that has been used in timesharing systems for decades.

Meanwhile, the IT department should work with the business to ensure that the technology and app road map match the business and its product plans.

Technically, a legacy application could have been written as recently as yesterday – it could be anything from an order processing system to a PowerPoint application.

Most large organisations will have many applications, built up over decades, to such an extent that understanding exactly which systems are continuing to add value to the business and which are redundant is far from straightforward.

Application Portfolio Management (APM) tools give CIOs an insight into all their existing systems, showing cost, performance and other factors that can aid the decision-making process.

Analysing the entire portfolio will show which applications are vital to the business and should therefore be modernised, and which can be delayed or in some cases retired altogether.

Contrary to popular belief, 20-year-old business IT applications written in older languages such as Cobol are in fact perfectly suited to running in the cloud.

At the time these applications were written they supported thousands of users, and on mainframes of the day that were as powerful as today's smartphones in terms of processing power and memory. The critical factor is that they and their frameworks can easily support multi-tenant and multi-user capabilities.

The notion of supporting many users on less powerful platforms translates to the cloud. The key is to get the platform to support all those same APIs so applications can move seamlessly into the cloud.

IT departments can ill afford to spend on shiny new technology when they already have fully functioning applications available.

Mark Haynie is chief technology officer for cloud computing at Micro Focus