Pega strongly recommends that you closely review and assess your entire application setup and deployment before migration and perform a thorough gap analysis.  Determining all of the required update and migration changes allows you to make all changes in one phase, rather than going back multiple times and making incremental changes (which may then require other changes).  Clients who follow this holistic, comprehensive approach experience the most efficient and cost-effective migrations.

Software configuration changes and application refactoring is often required when migrating your Pega applications to Pega Cloud – especially when updating and migrating older versions of applications. It is important to identify legacy features and functionality which may no longer be supported on Pega Cloud, or functionality that now uses a different method or software feature. Often legacy features and functionally can cause issues with maintainability or security if they are not remediated on Pega Cloud. In those cases, migration remediation – identifying and replacing the out-of-date features with secure, guardrail-compliant functionality – is required.

Document use cases, requirements, and solutions for all identified gaps and incorporate them into the Migration Project Plan. Plan a remediation strategy to address any gaps or deprecated features. Incorporate these into your Migration Project Plan.  Include a detailed list of changes, steps, and so on, as well as a checklist to verify completion.

Review the Modernization Implementation Guide for information on areas commonly impacted when modernizing Pega applications.  For more information, see Modernization Implementation Guide.

Keep in mind that remediation is not always a change in the application.  It could also be a change in processes.  For example, if you typically use a command line tool to interact directly with the database, you now need to use the Pega Cloud database tools.  Direct access to the database is not supported on Pega Cloud.

Gaps, remediations, functionality changes and areas for improvement may be addressed in the Update, Implement, or Evolve phases of the modernization journey. Classify them into the appropriate modernization phase based on the criteria for each phase.  For more information, see Modernization Journey.