From Legacy to Agile: Realistic Cloud Migrations with Cisco

From Legacy to Agile: Realistic Cloud Migrations with Cisco 

The Cloud Mandate Is Clear. The Path Is Not. 

CIOs and CTOs across India know what they want.  

1. Fewer silos.  
2. Lower operating costs.  
3. Elastic Compute.  
4. Location independence.  
5. Better security. 

What stands in the way is not intent. It’s infrastructure. 

Legacy networks. Custom-built apps. Compliance mandates. Static architectures. These do not migrate cleanly. And few businesses can afford to break things and start fresh. This is where cloud migration gets misunderstood. It is not a switch. It is a series of decisions. Some workloads move. Some stay. Some straddle. 

Cisco’s model supports this in-between state. Proactive Data Systems makes it operational. 

Why Cloud Migrations Stall 

Cloud-first sounds easy. But most Indian enterprises are not startups. They run SAP, Oracle, and homegrown ERP on bare metal. They manage compliance across state and sector regulators. They run hybrid teams in Coimbatore and Gurugram on patchy broadband. 

The bottlenecks are real: 

• Old VPNs with hardcoded routes 
• Licensing structures that penalise hybrid workloads 
• Security policies that don’t translate across clouds 
• Network teams and app teams working off different maps 

When the lift-and-shift fails, blame follows. When cloud-native rewrites stall, inertia wins. 

What Real Migration Looks Like 

A realistic cloud migration is one that: 

• Starts with business need, not cloud credits 
• Maps dependencies between workloads 
• Segments based on risk and changeability 
• Builds policy abstraction before moving data 
• Automates what must scale, and retains control where needed 

Cisco supports this architecture with a toolchain that focuses on control, observability, and interoperability. 

Cisco’s Stack for Migration Without Mayhem 

Cisco’s role in cloud migration is not to host. It is to connect, protect, and orchestrate. 

1. Cisco SD-WAN optimises cloud access, eliminates MPLS deadweight, and prioritises business-critical traffic. 
2. Cisco ACI extends policy control across data centres and clouds, treating them as one logical fabric. 
3. Cisco Intersight becomes the management layer, providing a single view across physical and virtual assets. 
4. Cisco Secure Workload enables segmentation that travels with the app, regardless of where it runs. 
5. Cisco Umbrella provides DNS-layer and secure web access, removing the need for backhauling traffic. 

This is not a cloud platform. It is the infrastructure that makes multi-cloud viable. 

What Most Enterprises Miss 

The hard part isn’t moving workloads. It’s keeping control after they move. Without shared policy enforcement, risk expands. Without unified visibility, troubleshooting breaks. Without consistent access control, compliance erodes. Enterprises focus on compute and storage. But what holds the architecture together is the network. 

A Migration Story from Pune 

A stock brokerage in Pune wanted to modernise its data infrastructure. The team planned to move analytics workloads to AWS and leave core transaction systems on-prem. The project stalled in phase two. Latency increased. Logs were incomplete. Policy enforcement broke between environments. 

Proactive Data Systems deployed Cisco SD-WAN to establish intelligent routing and reduce latency. Intersight unified operational visibility. Secure Workload enforced segmentation. Umbrella stopped DNS-based threats before they hit the network. They didn’t rewrite everything. They just stopped guessing what would work. 

Data That Cuts Through the Noise 

• Gartner’s 2024 CIO Agenda survey shows that 67 per cent of CIOs report delays in hybrid cloud migrations due to policy misalignment and visibility gaps. 
• IDC’s India CloudView Report 2023 found that 52 per cent of enterprises that adopted a network-first approach to cloud reported faster time to value. 

Where Proactive Data Systems Shifts the Outcome 

Most cloud migration partners focus on provisioning. Proactive focuses on architecture. 

We ask: 

• What needs to move, and why? 
• What breaks if it fails? 
• Who owns the policy? 
• How do you monitor across states and cloud providers? 

We build architecture that holds up in audits, that recovers fast when things break, and that scales when business does. We’ve done this in Delhi for logistics, in Bengaluru for SaaS, and in Mumbai for BFSI. Each one needed a different migration plan. None started with a template. 

Cloud Is a Step. Architecture Is the Strategy. 

You don’t migrate to the cloud. You redesign for the cloud. The faster you accept that, the more likely you are to succeed. Cisco provides the stack that keeps your policy intact, your network visible, and your users productive. Proactive makes sure it fits your business.