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Five Problems Keeping Legacy Apps Out of the Cloud

Did you think all those legacy apps would just float up into someone else's cloud infrastructure? Management, licensing and migration concerns highlight the list of troubles that vendors are now trying to address.
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4. You don't know your own legacy Your company may live and die by its line-of-business applications, but that doesn't mean you know everything going on behind the endlessly-customized codes, interfaces and forms that started out as business automation and turned into a rigid legacy application, according to CEO Mark Cashman and CTO Steve Yaskin of Queplix.

Queplix's tools are designed to extract data, metadata, business logic and security information from legacy applications using a mix of custom-written and canned analysis and conversion utilities, so the resulting code can be run on cloud computing platforms - usually internal clouds rather than public ones.

With all the data, data structures and policy guidelines extracted, Queplix can analyze security, data-access and compliance rules from both commercial and homegrown apps - often finding huge holes in the process.

"We run a report that will show big holes in security that security people don't know about and they don't like when they see it," Yaskin says. "Siebel isn't designed to share [access control list] data with SAP and vice versa, so no one knows users have all this access; when we take all that out, you can see the access points and potential breaks in security and turn them to your advantage."

Queplix sells a set of software development, analysis and conversion tools designed to extract data, business logic and security information from legacy apps so they'll run in cloud-computing environments.

5. Migration is manual and darn few tools will help Even at their best, Queplix and its competitors - master data management (MDM) providers such as Siperian and Initiate Systems - convert only a portion of the application and data, leaving the end-user or service provider to deal with the rest, according to John Abbott infrastructure analyst at The 451 Group, who published an evaluation of Queplix recently. Yaskin estimates Queplix' best shot automates 85 percent of the migration. When will the situation improve?

VMware, which bought application-virtualization-developer Springsource earlier this year, is working on the problem, but not for legacy applications. Smaller companies such as the Israeli firm Gizmox will put an AJAX GUI on a legacy app and run that in the cloud, but don't take care of its guts.

SAP and IBM - both of which have extensive custom-development and migration divisions - are also working on legacy-to-cloud migration tools, as is Oracle and Cobol-stalwart Micro Focus, Abbot says. So does Oracle, which is adopting technology developed by Sun.

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More about: Burton Group, Gartner, Gartner Group, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HP, IBM, IBM Australia, Initiate, Micro Focus, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, Stratus, VMware
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