Legacy to Cloud Migration: Greenfield

Business leaders are pushing their operations to the cloud in order to better manage internal resources, meet changing customer expectations, improve data mobility and leverage the potential of AI.

While every business views the cloud as their destination, not every cloud migration is the same. Typically, there are two main cloud strategies.

1. The Brownfield Cloud Strategy
2. The Greenfield Cloud Strategy

(In our previous blog, we discussed how Brownfield cloud migrators can face the challenges that arise when you migrate on-premise systems and applications to the cloud environment and how to reduce migration and hosting costs. You can read more about that here.)

The Greenfield Cloud Strategy

What is greenfield cloud migration?

As the name suggests, greenfield cloud migration is a fresh outlook, where you leverage the potential of modernization to reinvent your business processes based on proven, effective, in-market, cloud-based solutions. Instead of creating a replica of your existing legacy applications, your cloud adoption plan involves migrating just active data to an existing cloud-native application template.

What are the greenfield cloud expectations/goals?

By fully embracing a bold, new cloud strategy and adapting your workforce and business processes to a more digitally-engaged architecture, you anticipate accelerated workflows, greater integration, collaboration and business insights, and a fast track to a significant return on your investment.

What are the obstacles to realizing cloud migration goals?

Greenfield Cloud Migrators do not plan to shift the data history to the cloud, but it is still necessary to retain data history to support business users and customers (such as transaction data history). Therefore, the legacy application containers need preservation and storage, on premise or in the cloud. This can result in companies continuing to manage legacy licenses on top of their cloud contract licenses, with increasing cost and complexity. They also need to keep all of the internal resources in place to maintain those databases.

Alternatively, many businesses choose containerization as a method to bring over their data to the cloud rather than maintaining the legacy or refactoring the data. These types of containers are notorious for complicating data access for business users, as well as run the risk of data loss over time.

The need to retain data history along with a source application that can read it, draws financial and human resources away from developing and growing the new cloud environment. The risk of data loss also weighs heavily on the company. Greenfield Cloud Migrators need to find a way to take their users to the cloud without any of that technical debt or uncertainty.

How can businesses manage data history without impacting cloud ROI?

Greenfield cloud migrators can avoid the negatives of legacy retention, containers and excessive cloud migration by using a lower-cost, third party archive for modernized data access.

Businesses shopping for such a solution should look for one that is:

• Application agnostic
• Able to maintain the original database schema
• Customizable to user preferences
• Independent of the original application
• Low cost
• Easy to use with little maintenance

The benefits of this approach are immediate:

• Retire legacy databases
• Cut technical debt
• Ensure continued data access
• Avoid degradation in user access and/or data integrity
• Achieve autonomous control to meet stakeholder, compliance, and operational needs for access to data history

With your legacy data modernized through this approach, Greenfield Cloud Migrators can focus on growing their cloud environment and training their users, free of technical debt and data-at-risk.

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