Our thoughts on the future of digital innovation and the cloud.

In a world where technological advances are being made at a seemingly ever-faster rate, it can feel daunting to keep up. The pressure to upgrade computer systems and software can seem like a costly, frustrating, even futile task. It can be tempting to stake a claim in a trusted and familiar method to save time and hassle. But hanging on to legacy systems can bear a high cost for your business. This is an Azure migration story.

What is a legacy system?

The term refers to those older methods and technologies, including computer systems and applications, surpassed by new developments, yet which are still in use.

Consider when Microsoft retired Windows XP. While the program continued to run for years after Windows Vista, Windows 7, and their successors came into use. Eventually, support and security services stopped. You could continue to run on XP but at your own risk.

While appropriate to remain on a legacy system in some circumstances, in many cases, doing so can spell an end game as more-adaptive competition moves ahead. Indeed, Microsoft has advanced by leaps and bounds since the XP days, and any company still running that program sacrifices the great gains that current technology can offer.

Chevron is a fantastic example of a company that has views technology as a key company differentiator. When the ageing IT infrastructure threatened to compromise its security, speed, and data management, the company devised a plan to lift and shift 6,000 applications to a single cloud platform.

Chevron’s Azure Migration Journey

While they realized that moving to the cloud would significantly impact cost savings, they also knew that the transition would not be easy. They chose to focus on updating legacy systems, moving much of their infrastructure and apps “off-premises” – that is, to the cloud – and the result, in their own words, was “liberating.”

The company realized unprecedented speed, the volume of data, security, and ultimately, business value. They had become nimbler while at the same time experiencing better reliability and improved automatic disaster recovery. With information no longer vested in a physical machine’s operation, data synchronization improved across business units, protected from the physical failures (or disasters), which can occur an electronic device.

Thus, moving forward from legacy systems ensures that stored data is in its most current form. Therefore, obsolescence doesn’t result in lost access to archaic file types.

Technology itself may not make or break your business. Still, the way you engage and deploy technology can make all the difference.

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