5 Signs Your Legacy System Is Ready for a Cloud Migration

Not every legacy system needs to move to the cloud, and we say that as a company that does a lot of cloud migrations. But a few patterns reliably show up in the systems that do need to move, and soon.

The most common is hardware risk: a server that's out of warranty, running an OS version that no longer receives security patches, with no one on staff who remembers how it was originally configured. The second is scaling pain, when traffic spikes (a billing cycle, a seasonal rush, an announcement) regularly cause slowdowns or outright downtime. The third is backup anxiety: if you're not confident you could restore full service within a few hours of a hardware failure, that's a migration conversation waiting to happen.

The fourth sign is less technical: your team has started avoiding changes to the system because nobody wants to be the one who breaks it. That fear is a sign the system has outgrown safe maintenance on its current infrastructure. And the fifth is simply cost, when the all-in cost of maintaining ageing on-premise hardware, including the staff time, has quietly crept past what modern cloud infrastructure would cost for the same workload.

If two or more of these sound familiar, it's worth at least scoping what a staged migration would look like, even if you're not ready to commit yet.