Open Letter to the Editor of CIO regarding Cloud applications

This is an Open Letter to the Editor of CIO in response to an article posted on Computer World discussing the five problems that supposedly keep legacy applications out of the Cloud.

Dear Editor,

In light of your recent article about the challenges that legacy application face in migrating to the cloud, below please find a response which provides answers to 4 of the most problematic issues. We believe your readers would greatly benefit from the information, and we regret that we were not directly interviewed about these issues in advance of your article. We recognize your hesitation to publish such a piece because it promotes a product so blatantly, due to the originality and uniqueness of Visual WebGui, currently being the only one in the world that can take .NET desktop applications directly to the cloud with the click of a button.  Your readers were told of the problems with the cloud, and we believe that they will find it useful to know that most of the concerns raised in your article have already been attended to by VWG.  We’re one step ahead of the market with our real world and vision.

1. Just as no 2 clouds in the sky are alike… For those who are not familiar enough with Cloud technology, it’s easy to throw together all cloud platforms into one category.  But that’s like throwing planes, trains and automobiles into one category and making them all equal.  With all due respect, in reality, the advancement of the cloud today means that “cloud platform” can refer to different architectures, capabilities and services, starting from the virtual machines bases clouds (such as the Amazon AWS or the v-Cloud by VMware) to the most abstract deployment form of clouds (such as Windows Azure or Google App Engine), and everything in between. 
    
   It’s not one product but rather a myriad that have a single common denominator: they all provide a dynamic form of web applications/environments hosting.  We can bind them all together but only with a pure web architecture that is cloud aware and can benefit from the various services using the most common approach.
   
   That exists today in solutions such as Visual WebGui, which is a pure (managed) .NET based platform which executes plain web applications; in addition to its ability to connect different clouds, it offers benefits that can save organizations significant funds.  For example, with proper planning, it can be possible to perform migration of apps from one cloud provider to another without having to perform major changes.
    
2. Behind the lock and key…The potential serious security hazards are hindering enterprises from moving to the cloud, as exposing a software application to the public web can potentially result in unauthorized access to data. Furthermore, being able to trust a complete isolation of storage and being able to audit and monitor access, as well as to grant and prevent permissions on those systems, is an open issue.
   
   But here again, there is a solution.  One of Visual WebGui’s primary by design advantages is that the entire application runs on the server using a very organized methodology that makes it possible to audit every move of any user on the system, and grant or prevent access from users at runtime.
   
   And in terms of client (browser or device) safety, VWG ‘empty client’ runtime paradigm offers a complete secured client, making it impossible to disrupt or change the server’s logics by manipulating the client scripts. The ‘empty client’ also means that the client never exposes applicative data that was not supposed to be presented on the screen, a scenario that is often caused by the development method on which developers use applicative data to link between client piece with the server. Furthermore, data is never cached on the browser.
    
3. You don’t know your legacy apps… Line-of-business applications are extremely critical to the business, and demand an expedited means of transferring the current forms, complexities and logics to the cloud, as an alternative of the hundreds of thousands of hours of work that would have to be put in by human effort.  Alternatively, significant experience can be left behind, resulting in much reduced productivity and loses.  Visual WebGui offers full migration path for legacy WinForms and VB 6.0 applications including their entire business logics, forms and complexity to the cloud environment through a low costing and much less painful process.
    
4. Migration is manual and too darn few tools will help… Migration of legacy applications to cloud environments can be costly, especially when it comes to complex highly invested enterprise applications. Using Visual WebGui can cut down the manual labor, and even eradicate it, due to a straight forward path of migration for WinForms and VB 6.0.  Currently, this is the best starting point for migration of any other desktop technology to the cloud.

The security of the cloud, the storage, the ability to migrate apps to the cloud, and all other “problems” that worry the world are merely a walk on the beach with Visual WebGui.  So what’s the downside?  Only that if Google Apps had used Visual WebGui, newspapers would have lost a lot of their headlines over the past few months!