Challenges in migrating legacy software systems to the cloud an empirical study

TL;DR

This empirical study identifies and analyzes the key challenges faced during the migration of legacy systems to cloud platforms, providing a practical, platform-agnostic guide based on expert insights.

Contribution

It introduces a validated model of migration activities and highlights critical challenges, offering a comprehensive, practical guide for successful legacy-to-cloud migration.

Findings

Identified critical challenges in cloud migration activities

Validated model of migration process through expert survey

Provided practical, platform-independent migration recommendations

Abstract

Moving existing legacy systems to cloud platforms is a difficult and high cost process that may involve technical and non-technical resources and challenges. There is evidence that the lack of understanding and preparedness of cloud computing migration underpin many migration failures in achieving organisations goals. The main goal of this article is to identify the most important challenging activities for moving legacy systems to cloud platforms from a perspective of reengineering process. Through a combination of a bottom-up and a top-down analysis, a set of common activities is derived from the extant cloud computing literature. These are expressed as a model and are validated using a population of 104 shortlisted and randomly selected domain experts from different industry sectors. We used a Web-based survey questionnaire to collect data and analysed them using SPSS Sample T-Test. The results of this study highlight the most important and critical challenges that should be addressed by various roles within a legacy to cloud migration endeavour. The study provides an overall understanding of this process including common occurring activities, concerns and recommendations. In addition, the findings of this study constitute a practical guide to conduct this transition. This guide is platform agnostic and independent from any specific migration scenario, cloud platform, or an application domain. Keywords. Cloud Computing, Legacy Systems, Cloud Migration, Cloud Migration Process