What Is Application Migration: Process, Strategy, & Tools

The transfer of information and applications across different platforms is becoming increasingly common. According to Industry Arc, the global migration market is projected to grow at a rate of 18.4% CAGR between 2024 and 2030. This growth is driven by the need of businesses to adapt to modern infrastructure and keep up with evolving technological needs.

One key aspect of this trend is application migration, which involves moving applications from one environment to another. This process allows organizations to achieve greater scalability, flexibility, operational efficiency, and ability to adapt to change.

Let’s dive deeper into the concept of application migration, exploring why it has become essential and scenarios when you should apply it.

What is Application Migration?

Application migration is the process of moving software applications from one computing environment to another. Depending on your organization’s objective, application migration can be performed on-premise to on-premise, cloud-to-cloud (AWS to Azure), or on-premise to the cloud (legacy systems to modern platforms). The decision to migrate could be based on factors including flexibility, scalability, cost, and business continuity.

When & Why Should You Migrate Applications?

Let’s look at some of the benefits of application migration:

Performance Optimization

Application migration becomes necessary when the current infrastructure fails to deliver the performance required to meet business needs. For instance, outdated hardware, such as slow processors or limited memory, can lead to increased latency.

Migrating to a modern environment, whether on-premise, cloud-based, or hybrid, enables faster hardware like solid-state drives, improved processors, and scalable memory. These environments also include advanced configurations like load balancing and automated scaling, ensuring that applications can handle high loads without compromising performance.

Security and Compliance

You can consider moving your application to a new environment if you want to strengthen the data protection measures proactively and match evolving security standards. For example, legacy systems may lack robust security features or might not support new compliance features.

Moving your application to a new environment enables you to adopt its advanced security measures, such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and continuous monitoring. The built-in tools and certifications on these platforms help your organization to align with standards like GDPR and HIPAA, ensuring data integrity and security.

Modernization

If your applications are running on outdated or unsupported hardware and software, they are challenging to maintain and integrate with modern tools. Migrating to an advanced environment solution allows you to align with the latest technologies. You can further utilize technologies such as ML and AI to automate workflows and improve user experience.

Challenges With Application Migration

During application migration, you can encounter some challenges. Here are a few of them:

Data Loss and Downtime

Data loss during application migration can occur for various reasons, including incompatible formats of the new and old systems or incomplete transfers. Downtime during migration occurs due to database crashes, application bugs, or software errors.

Security Vulnerabilities

Migrating your application to a new platform can expose it to threats if security measures are not properly configured or if the process bypasses existing safeguards. For example, if sensitive data is transferred without proper encryption or temporarily stored in a less secure location, attackers can easily intercept and access it.

Technical Dependencies

Technical dependencies refer to technologies, frameworks, libraries, or databases that the application relies on to function correctly. These dependencies may not always be compatible with the target environment. For example, when migrating to the cloud, the original infrastructure of the application may differ from the cloud environment configuration requirements. This can lead to incompatibility, configuration mismatch, or dependency issues, causing the application to fail to function correctly.

Need for Skilled Professionals

Application migration involves complex tasks such as configuring infrastructure settings, transferring data, and adapting code to a new environment. These processes require careful planning and a deep understanding of systems. Without the right expertise, your organization may face increased risk, including failed configurations, delays, and even service disruptions.

Resource and Cost Management

Migrating applications requires substantial amount of resources, such as skilled professionals, computing power, and storage capacity. Managing these resources can be difficult, especially when unexpected issues arise, leading to delays or the need for additional resources. Moreover, it can result in unforeseen costs due to extended timelines and requirements for specialized tools and services to ensure applications run properly in new environments.

Application Migration Strategies

Lift and Shift

Lift and Shift is also known as the Rehost strategy. It includes ‘lifting’ the application from its existing environment (on-premises or other platform) and ‘shifting’ to another without any modification. The primary benefit of this strategy is it allows for a quick migration with minimal disruption.

Re-Platforming

Re-platforming is an application modernization strategy that involves transferring the core functionality, data, and design (part of the application) from one platform to another. It offers a mid-way point between rebuilding an app entirely and almost making no changes. While the core application may remain the same, this approach helps optimize the application to work better in the new environment.

Re-Architecting

When implementing re-architecting, an application is fundamentally redesigned or rebuilt so it better aligns with the target environment and its capabilities. The redesigning may involve decoupling components of the application so it can run independently in a new environment, often using microservices, containers, or serverless functions.

This strategy also involves making considerable changes to the application’s code base. You need to be cautious when making changes to ensure that the integrity and functionality of the application remain intact.

Replace/Retire

An application may be retired if it no longer serves a significant business purpose or if maintaining it is costly. The Replace/Retire approach involves discontinuing the support for an application instead of migrating it. For example, some applications are no longer in use but continue to consume on-premises computing resources. Retiring such an application can free up resources while replacing it with a modern application that can better align with evolving technologies.

How Does the Application Migration Process Work?

There are several key steps involved while implementing application migration, including planning, coordination, and execution. Here is a breakdown of how the process works:

Conduct a Technical Audit

The technical audit is focused on evaluating the current state of your applications, data processes, and infrastructure. The audit gives an overview of the scale of migration, its benefits, and potential risks associated with it.

Plan the Migration

Planning involves defining clear objectives and creating step-by-step application transfer strategies. You must build a skilled migration team comprising IT professionals such as data engineers, software developers, and security officers to ensure that migration is executed effectively.

Select a Migration Strategy

Choose a strategy that best suits your organization's objectives, priorities, and resources. For example, if you’re moving multiple workloads to the cloud, choosing re-platforming or rearchitecting might be best so the application has some room for remediation.

Test and Perform Application Migration

Create a test environment to rehearse the migration process before transitioning. The testing prepares you to tend to potential challenges with confidence. After testing, you can move the workload to their new environment using migration tools. Ensure that the migration team is available to handle any technical issues that may arise.

Monitor the Application

Once you have successfully migrated your application to another environment, observe its performance. Look for any issues, such as integrity or irregular behavior, that affect service delivery. Revisit and refine the migration process if necessary to optimize future workflows.

Application Pre-Migration Checklist

• Identify the dependencies of your applications such as software or third-party integration, to ensure all components function correctly post migration.
• Document the current architecture and resource usage to understand the baseline environment and avoid resource misallocation.
• Check compatibility with the target environment to address potential conflicts before migration.
• Review security policies and compliance standards to prevent breaches and adhere to regulations.
• Conduct dry runs to test the migration process and identify any issues early.
• Define and prepare a post-migration validation checklist to confirm success and resolve outstanding issues.

For further guidance on managing the migration process, you can refer to our comprehensive guide on Data Migration Plan, Process & Checklist.

Best Practices to Ensure Data Quality During Migration

• Data Quality Assessment: Prior to migrating your application, take time to review existing data and identify and address any inconsistencies, duplicates, or errors.
• ‍Data Cleaning: To ensure consistency, remove duplicates, fix errors, and standardize formats, you can use different data cleaning tools.
• ‍Validation Rules: Implement validation rules to check only accurate and correct data that has been migrated.
• ‍Backup Data: Create a full backup of the source application data to safeguard it against loss or corruption.
• ‍Monitor Migration Process: Track the data transfer process to detect and resolve anomalies quickly.

How to Handle Legacy Application Migration?

Legacy systems are software applications that organizations still use but need to be updated in terms of functionality compared to new technology. To handle legacy application migration effectively, you can use a reverse engineering approach to understand the system’s processes and how it works.

If the priority is modularizing these applications, you can break them down into smaller, more manageable components for a phased migration. This allows you to modernize the architecture progressively. You can also leverage frameworks like application mapping to identify hidden connections and dependencies and consider using containerization to bridge compatibility gaps.

Application Post-Migration Tips

• Validate the migrated data and application functionality to ensure everything operates as expected in the new environment.
• Continuously track system performance and address any latency, resource utilization, or scalability issues.
• Review and optimize configurations for computing, storage, and network settings to match the new environment’s needs.
• Conduct a security audit to verify access controls, encryption, and compliance with required standards.
• Update application documentation to reflect the new architecture, workflow, and configurations.
• Enable automated backups to safeguard against data loss during process failure.
• Schedule regular maintenance checks to monitor application health and ensure long-term stability.

How Airbyte Supports Application Migration

Data migration is an essential aspect of application migration. Many applications, particularly those that manage or process large amounts of data, rely on external databases to store and manage information. Transferring these datasets accurately and efficiently ensures the application’s continuity and performance in a new environment.

‍Airbyte is an AI-powered data integration tool that allows you to transfer data between multiple sources and destinations. It offers a library of 550+ pre-built connectors, including databases, API, file formats, and analytical platforms for sales, marketing, and finance.

If your application depends on a unique source, you can use Airbyte’s Connector Builder to build customer connectors. Furthermore, the AI Assist functionality within the Connector Builder speeds up the configuration process. It reads the API documentation using links and works best with REST APIs.

In addition, Airbyte enables you to track data changes through Change Data Capture. This functionality helps to identify incremental changes in source data and replicate them in the target system.

Applications Migration Tools You Can Use

The following are the best tools that can be used to implement application migration:

AWS Application Migration Service

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) provides a lift-shift migration solution for moving applications to AWS. It enables you to migrate servers from physical, virtual, or cloud environments to AWS. Once migrated, applications can run natively on AWS.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud offers solutions and services that enable you to migrate your data and applications to the cloud while modernizing and innovating at your own pace. For example, Google’s Migrate for Compute Engine solution allows you to move physical servers and VMs to Google Cloud. This tool consists of testing and stateful rollback capabilities, making it ideal for modification and validation.

Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is a Microsoft service that helps to plan, assess, and migrate your workload to Azure. It offers a variety of tools, such as Azure DMS, Web App Migration Assistant, and Azure Data Box. By utilizing these tools, you can evaluate physical and virtual servers and applications and perform the migration with minimal downtime.

Conclusion

Application migration helps your organization stay competitive in the technological landscape. Moving applications to a more modern platform, such as the cloud, allows businesses to overcome the limitations of older systems and open new opportunities. You can migrate your application using strategies like rehosting, refactoring, and retire. A well-executed migration strategy can enhance your scalability, reduce costs, and drive innovation.