The limitations associated with legacy applications are forcing more and more organizations to take a hard look at modernizing their IT portfolios. Pending retirements of key development staff means that much of an organization’s legacy technology knowledge may soon walk out the door. Replacements for these key resources are becoming more and more difficult to find. Total cost of ownership for legacy mainframe infrastructure and higher productivity development environments make newer technologies financially attractive. Key application software is often brittle from decades of patches, making it difficult for the IT organization to respond to rapidly evolving business needs.

Does this scenario sound familiar? If so, yours is one of thousands of organizations with a growing need to modernize your legacy IT application portfolio. This involves migrating your applications to a new technology platform and transforming application source code to a modern development environment such as .NET or Java.

Increasingly, many organizations are considering Cloud Computing as a target platform for modernization. Rather than purchasing and operating new IT infrastructure, "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) Cloud solutions enable the computing resources you need to be accessed via the Internet, typically provided by a third party.

Cloud computing can offer a number of advantages, chief among them the following:

• Frees up internal resources – your people can focus on business needs rather than managing infrastructure
• Scalability – as your computing needs grow, you can consume more Cloud resources without having to worry about scaling up your own infrastructure
• Lower total cost of ownership
• 24x7 support
• Reliability
• Sustainability

To help organizations address these needs, Trinity Millennium Group offers a service called Phased Modernization to the Cloud, or PMC for short. This is a specialized service to transform legacy applications to modern Cloud Computing environments.

Trinity’s PMC service involves the following phases:

Phase I – Evaluate

This phase is a planning step required to develop an appropriate modernization strategy for your organization. The specific evaluation components depend on the business factors driving your modernization needs, and most typically include:

• AEM™ Characterization analysis to understand the size, composition, complexity and other key characteristics of your legacy application portfolio.
• Clustering Analysis to identify in detail all dependencies within and between applications that can affect modernization planning.
• Modernization Requirements workshops to understand your organization’s needs and priorities, including technical and business drivers for modernization to the Cloud.

The results of these activities feed into the development of a comprehensive Cloud Migration plan, with specific activities and timeframes to indicate how PMC Phases II and III will achieve your modernization objectives.

Phase II – Stabilize

Frequently Trinity’s clients come to us with time and budget pressures related to their legacy platform and development environment. Mainframe hosting costs are a typical concern, often coupled with high ongoing licensing costs for mainframe software development and database environments. There may be a need to seek alternatives in advance of upcoming renewal dates. The objective of this Stabilize phase is to address this type of critical concern as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. This may involve re-hosting your software to a Cloud Computing platform initially, making as few changes as possible to the application software to minimize time, cost, and risk associated with this step.

This phase provides the following primary advantages:

• Supports migrating off legacy hardware platforms, which brings into play the "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) Cloud Computing advantages mentioned above (scalability, reliability, etc.);
• Reduces infrastructure costs as quickly as possible; and
• Frees up budget and IT resources to address other modernization goals in PMC Phase III.

This interim step retains the legacy software, which means challenges associated with brittle code and retiring IT resources still remain to be dealt with in Phase III.

Phase III – Transition

Once legacy applications are hosted in a stable cost-effective environment, Trinity’s Automation-Enabled Modernization™ (AEM™) methodology transforms older source code into modern technologies such as .NET or Java. Depending on the complexity and make-up of the application portfolio, transformation can take place in one or several releases, according to the planning completed in PMC Phase I.

Source code and database transformation positions your applications for the future, resulting in:

• No more reliance on obsolescent technologies;
• A fresh start on code quality, restoring your applications to a well-designed, highly maintainable, and fully documented state;
• Freedom from the high licensing costs of legacy software run time environments;
• Reduced maintenance effort and costs moving forward;
• Increased agility responding to ongoing changes to business requirements; and
• Access to widely available resources with modern programming skill sets.

The overall result is a complete rejuvenation for your core IT applications. Trinity’s Phased Modernization to the Cloud allows you to move to modern software development technologies while taking advantage of the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of Cloud Computing.

Call today to find out how Trinity can leverage Cloud Computing while modernizing your applications. Request a Call.