Virtustream: Legacy applications are no barrier to cloud

Companies concerned that moving to the cloud will force them to re-write their mission-critical legacy applications have nothing to fear, claims Virtustream.

Some organisations are wary of embracing cloud, as the cost of re-writing legacy applications to fit the new architecture could be too high.

However, Kevin Reid, CEO and CTO of cloud service provider Virtustream, said even firms whose key applications were written in ‘dead’ programming languages can take advantage of cloud.

“[One of our customers had] applications that were written as early as 35 years ago and, over time, some of the people who wrote them have died [or] retired, [and] the technology they wrote it in originally is no longer the technology you would use going forward,” Reid told Cloud Pro.

“But if you look at investment to date, they have spent tens-of-millions of dollars developing this application and it works beautifully, so it is difficult for them to justify [the cost of] going in and re-writing the application.”

There are options available for companies that do not want to rewrite their applications to make use of cloud, Reid explained.

“There are tools where if you have the source code for the applications, even if it is in older languages like COBOL, you can actually run it through them and it translates it into either Java or .NET," he said.

“A lot of times it is not perfect, depending on how old the code is, and you may get 80 – 90 percent conversion, but there are people who specialise in this and can go in, have a look at the bits and pieces that do not work and they manually recode those pieces, rather than re-writing the entire application.”

Once the transition is made, the application can cost up to 60 percent less to maintain on new architecture and in the cloud than it used to, claimed Reid.

“A lot of those older platforms are very expensive, because you are paying almost ransom money to the companies that made them because you have no choice," he said.

"Every year the conversion tools are getting better and the recovery rates are getting higher. So that is becoming a really attractive option for people who are keen to move onto modern architecture."