Using Azure to Build Business Portals to Legacy Systems

• Azure services can be used to build customer, employee, and partner portals that access legacy enterprise systems, such as SAP.
• The services can be a cost-effective, time-efficient approach to scaling, securing, and integrating access to legacy systems.
• Several Azure services are required, and design, deployment, management, and cost controls considerations are necessary.

Organizations with Web and mobile portals that access services and data from multiple business systems, such as customer resource management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), can benefit from Azure solutions that can expand the capacity, speed access times, and improve the security of those portals. Furthermore, Azure can simplify integrating business systems without new on-premises investments. Organizations with Azure monetary commitments and resources for new development should evaluate this type of solution.

Using Azure for Access to, Integration of Existing Systems

The adoption of cloud-based solutions, such as those deployed in Azure, can be approached in several ways. Lift-and-shift strategies, where existing solutions are migrated to Azure VMs with minimal design and coding alterations, are commonly used as a first step to reduce complexity, costs, and risk. Rewriting or building new applications to run on Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings can require significantly greater resources for planning, design, development, and establishment of new management processes. A combination of the approaches is typical for enterprises with large numbers of on-premises legacy solutions.