Moving Existing Applications into the Cloud

One of the issues with cloud computing that you hear all the time is how hard it is to move existing applications to the cloud. This is because most existing on-premise applications were never designed to be run as a service, so they don’t support modern application interfaces such as Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA).

But CloudSwitch has come up with an interesting approach to this problem in the form of Explorer software that wraps modern interfaces around legacy applications once they have been moved to the Amazon EC2 cloud computing service.

According to CloudSwitch CEO John McEleney, this approach may not work for transaction processing applications, but it is more than adequate to handle the needs of a high percentage of existing enterprise applications. The unique thing about the CloudSwitch approach, he added, is that even though the application is running in the cloud, it maintains all links with on-premise application and systems management tools.

For the most part, cloud computing platforms have been assigned to run utilitarian applications such as backup and recovery and new applications sporting modern interfaces. But if there is a reliable way to start moving legacy applications into the cloud, it opens up all kinds of new possibilities for IT organizations trying to reduce their capital costs.

IT organizations may only want to move portions of legacy applications into the cloud, based on performance considerations. But the nice thing about the CloudSwitch offering is that it finally gives IT organizations a viable cloud computing option when it comes to existing enterprise applications.