Why
The migration dilemma
The need to migrate away from a legacy environment to a modern environment can have multiple reasons. Just to name a few of them:
- Move to a web-based, service-oriented architecture
- Rising maintenance costs due to high personnel costs
- Difficulty finding employees capable of working in the legacy environment
- Legacy technology is a barrier for near- or offshoring
- Scalability / performance problems
- Lack of supporting enterprise frameworks
Alternatives
The migration of a legacy application is complicated and the alternatives are limited. Alternatives could be:
- Greenfield engineering
- Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)
Both are not very likely or attractive alternatives.
Migration scenarios
With the traditional migration approach, you copy your source code, then translate and re-architect it to suit the new environment. In the meantime you still have to maintain your actual code. The risks concerned with this approach are:
- Uncertainty about migration end-date
- Parallel source code branches for a long time (error prone and resource binding)
- Problems to keep migrated application in sync with ongoing development in the legacy-application
- Uncertainty about consistency, performance and quality of migrated code
- Translation and re-architecture is a one-way street (not repeatable)
- Multiple steps at once (translation, re-architecture, change of frameworks - leads to uncertainty about the cause of errors)
This is where CtoJ enters the stage. With the use of CtoJ technology and its defined migration process you can focus the attention of your valuable resources on the re-architecture of the application.
Learn how CtoJ allows a smooth legacy migration.
If you want to learn more about a potential business case, request the CtoJ business case example.