As an organization, you may be facing several challenges with your legacy Java applications. From our experience, we know that clients who maintain legacy Java applications struggle with these challenges.

🧐 Challenges to solve

• Outdated technology: Legacy Java-based applications may rely on outdated libraries, frameworks, and technologies that are no longer maintained or compatible with modern systems.
• Security vulnerabilities: Older applications may have security vulnerabilities that have been discovered and exploited since their creation, putting the company’s data and reputation at risk.
• Compatibility issues: Legacy Java-based applications may not be compatible with newer systems or applications, which can make it challenging to integrate them with other tools or upgrade them.
• Resource constraints: The team responsible for maintaining and operating legacy applications may have limited resources, which can make it difficult to allocate enough time and attention to each application.
• Lack of support: Some legacy applications may no longer be supported by the original developer or vendor, making it challenging to find solutions to problems or receive timely updates and patches.
• Cost of maintenance: Maintaining and operating legacy applications can be expensive due to the need to maintain outdated hardware, software, and licenses, as well as the additional costs associated with troubleshooting and repairing problems.
• Your company has a cloud adoption strategy. Yet these applications were not designed for the cloud, and there is no clear path to migrate them due to technical blockers.

Most of these apps, however, are still critical for the smooth operation of your business. Their age is now a ticking bomb, and you know it’s time to think about modernizing them before technical debt and obsolescence catches up with you.

🏆 The solution

With our Java application modernization solution on Microsoft Azure, we will analyze one of your Java apps and tackle the following issues:

➡️ Provide Azure governance guidelines

If your organization is new to Azure, we will propose a governance model for you, which includes topics like:

• how to purchase Azure,
• define the structure of your management groups, subscriptions and resource groups,
• define a way to manage billing of Azure resources, to ensure you have the costs under control at all times.

➡️ Application migration architecture

We will propose a migration that suits your needs, and define a solution architecture for your migrated app based on that. The migration approach can go from the classic Lift and Shift from your data center to the Azure cloud, all the way up to rearchitecting it. Which approach to follow will be decided together with you and based on your needs and expectations. The architecture will not only include your app, but also all the ancillary Azure services and infrastructure which will be needed to support your migrated app, such as networking requirements (VNets, DNS resolution, IP address spaces, etc), inter-connectivity with your on-prem network (if needed) and many others.

➡️ Cloud environment sizing

Since the economics of the cloud are significantly different from your on-prem environment, we aim to size the architecture of your modernized application in a way that works better with the cloud’s consumption-based pricing model. In particular, we aim to break away from the traditional expensive on-prem hardware and licensing expenditures and extract more value from Platform-as-a-service alternatives. Here, we will analyze the usage of large-scale runtimes (such as Azure Kubernetes Service) to provide a hosting environment for your Java apps. This approach could then be reused by other Java apps in your organization, thus providing an environment that promotes the reusability of resources. Define the modernization approach for your app

We will define a modernization approach and migration alternatives. We do this by leveraging the 5 R’s of application modernization. We analyze your Java application, its architecture and business criticality, and propose to you a way to modernize the app and how to migrate it to the cloud.

➡️ Improving the end-user experience

Modernizing your applications by rearchitecting or refactoring them can help refresh their user experience and make them more scalable and modular. The migration process also presents an opportunity to take advantage of cloud-native features, such as easier integration with database-as-a-service solutions, and extend the application’s support period by using the newer version of Java with its latest features.

➡️ Improving your cybersecurity posture

Most of these Java apps deal with critical business or customer information. While modernizing and moving your application to the cloud, we need to ensure your cybersecurity posture is improved. This includes topics like:

• isolating the infrastructure of your application inside a cloud VNet,
• providing infrastructure services in the cloud, such as directory services, DNS and allocating a proper IP address space,
• allowing secure access to operators,
• defining the correct networking integration between your cloud environment and your on-premises environment.

➡️ Invest in automation to increase team velocity

Another advantage of migrating to the cloud is that you can improve the velocity of your application delivery through mature CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code. You can also use out-of-the-box cloud services to collect telemetry and usage data, analyze it, and act on it faster, which can improve the operations of your application and allow your team to iterate faster.

✅ Deliverables

As part of this engagement, we will produce the following deliverables:

➡️ Architecture blueprint

We will document this in your wiki (Confluence, Azure DevOps wiki, Notion, or any other):

• Azure naming conventions for resource types, applications and their environment.
• Selection of Azure Active Directory tenant.
• Recommendation on how to provision that tenant, and how to use ADConnect to sync users/groups/passwords to the cloud from the on-prem environment.
• Recommendation on how the customer should be paying for Azure services.
• Design of the management groups, subscriptions and resource group structure.
• Network connectivity and topology design and recommendation for interconnectivity between Azure VNets and on-premise networks if applicable.
• Modernized application architecture.
• Data architecture and migration guide to a cloud Db.
• Utilizing Secure Privilege Access to ensure your operators have secure access to the cloud environment.
• Data encryption analysis accordingly to the client’s cybersecurity policies.

➡️ Engineering backlog

We will document an engineering backlog in your project issue tracking system (JIRA, Azure DevOps or other). The purpose of this backlog is to document the Features and User Stories that are needed to realize the architecture blueprint described above. You can use this backlog to kick off your project right after the architecture is approved.

💼 Price

The investment in this solution ranges between 15’000 and 35’000 CHF.

🤝 Reference case

Learn more about how we have done this in the past by looking at this customer reference case: