Migrating on -premises application to windows azure platform (microsoft cloud)

Abstract

Legacy systems are usually attached with outdated technologies which over time become a bottleneck for organizations to manage and maintain. Old and poorly utilized architecture make systems run slow and far from expected, however sometimes organization cannot live without those. Renewing application architecture can be considered as an option but it is time consuming and very costly. Cloud computing as an ultimate solution can be proposed to migrate on-premises application to a utilized environment in terms of infrastructure, computing power and virtualization. In addition, it provides a highly available and elastic computing environment which makes organizations to only pay for what they use. In this research, after a brief introduction to main concepts of cloud computing particularly Windows Azure platform (Microsoft Cloud), it is tried to analyze and assess OnePortfolio system developed by Riskk Sdn Bhd, to see whether it is feasible to be moved to Windows Azure. OnePortfolio operates on a SOA architecture comprised of three main components: services, client application and database. Throughout this research, Windows Azure migration lifecycle in compliance with ISO/IEC 14764 international standard is used as the methodology to perform the migration. Once the application is analyzed and migrated to cloud, it is compared to on-premises environment to evaluate its performance and security mechanism.