MSPs Challenged to Balance Cloud Migration With Support for Legacy Platforms

Cloud migration is a top priority for CIOs in 2019, and the use-case for redundancy via cloud-based backup is compelling and clear. With the shortage of IT talent and costs of hiring, training and keeping skilled personnel, the case for partnering with MSPs also makes a lot of sense for small and mid-sized businesses.

With a long history of working with companies that use MultiValue platforms, engineers at companies like NexusTek are keenly aware that hosting application development platforms like MultiValue in the cloud offer an abundance of business benefits and value to customers. However, over the past 24 months, the company realized that cloud migration wasn’t the largest hurdle for these customers. Rather, it was working with a partner who could not only manage cloud environments, but who also was intimately familiar with the nuances of legacy platforms — whether on-premises or in the cloud.

NexusTek’s Randy Nieves

We sat down with Randy Nieves, chief technology officer and senior vice president of product management for NexusTek, to get a few insights on the demand for legacy system support vs the initial plans to move the majority of resources to cloud support.

While some companies can save money by moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud, this option didn’t seem to be a fit for some of NexusTek’s MultiValue customers. One customer noted that after meeting with several cloud providers to design a virtual environment in a colocation center, each offering was cost-prohibitive. In addition, each of the providers with whom they met were unable to support ERP systems that utilized a MultiValue database.

MultiValue is a database system that incorporates the features of multidimensional and NoSQL databases to store information. Like the relational database model, MultiValue databases store data in tables. However, MultiValue databases use a less rigid schema than a relational database, and with MultiValue databases a single field can have a list of values. This means that one table cell (i.e., a field) can have several values unlike relational databases where each cell can have only one value.

NexusTek offers software solutions that enable customers to preserve decades of investment in custom applications, including MultiValue systems, while embracing modern features associated with cloud computing. This is generally acknowledged to be more economical than buying new equipment and managing it in a colocation facility, making NexusTek’s cloud platform optimized for high-performance business applications, accounting systems and legacy ERP applications.

So, is it difficult for companies to find MSPs who can support legacy infrastructure these days?

A survey of 1,355 IT professionals published this week on behalf of…