To be successful in today’s landscape, organizations must deliver memorable customer experiences, demonstrate innovation, and be adaptable to the constant shifts of the marketplace. Embracing cloud technology is imperative to achieve these high levels of scalability and agility while minimizing current and future technical debt. However, moving to the cloud is only one (albeit significant) component of modernizing a business’s applications. Application modernization is a must.
Application modernization is when you take existing legacy applications and digitally transform their platform infrastructure, internal architecture, and/or features. It’s going from tightly-coupled systems with various dependencies to loosely-coupled ones that improve application scalability, resilience, and extensibility. The goal of application modernization is to create a more agile, flexible, and highly available application environment.
However, simply lifting and shifting complex monolithic applications to a public cloud service provider is not equivalent to becoming a modern enterprise. Migrating to the cloud can help speed up innovation, but if businesses do not build cloud-native applications, they are simply moving workloads. To maximize the benefits of the cloud and become a modern business, organizations must strive to be cloud-native.
Why is migration to the cloud necessary for application modernization?
One of the top reasons to migrate to the cloud is to increase business agility, velocity, and scalability. Companies also enjoy increased productivity and efficiency of their workforce when they utilize cloud infrastructure. The cloud enables organizations to digitally transform their business with modern technologies and reestablish their applications within a modern framework.
When a business migrates to the cloud, that shouldn’t be considered the “finish line” in its modernization journey. The cloud is a means to an enterprise’s modernization efforts. An organization also has to update its culture and processes to enable high-performing software development if it is truly looking to modernize its application environment.
Why is application modernization necessary?
The bottom line is that modernizing applications will generate more business. Refusing to update infrastructure, technology, applications, and approaches to software development will place a company significantly behind in a race where there are very responsive and innovative competitors. Enterprises that were not born digital must evolve quickly to stay afloat in today’s ultra-demanding landscape.
Application modernization is not simply a survival tactic, but it is also a crucial method to achieve business agility. Digital transformation offers some of the following measurable outcomes and benefits to a company:
Optimize costs and resources
Modernizing applications utilizing cloud service providers can save businesses money. Planning a cloud migration can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), allowing organizations to focus on their core business and missions rather than expending energy on managing servers and on-premise infrastructures.
Additionally, by using cloud platforms, enterprises have access to a variety of robust services and automation tools that will eventually result in noticeable savings and cost optimization both of time and money. Deploying enterprise solutions via a cloud service provider allows organizations to retire expensive legacy infrastructure, reduce time and fiduciary costs, experience agility through automation, and reallocate resources towards other imperative business needs.
Mitigate risk
Staying up to date with compliance and security standards is non-negotiable. Modernization enables companies to support mandated and critical changes such as regulatory compliance in a punctual manner. Enterprises can use modernization initiatives to invest in technology and process improvements necessary for security requirements.
Work with a trusted and experienced cloud partner
The migration process to the cloud requires working with a provider who has experience in retiring legacy systems and emerging technologies to migrate databases, servers, and data. Working with a cloud service provider and/or a cloud advisory firm enables businesses to modernize their applications smoothly. Cloud partners provide access to the vital tools and knowledge needed to digitally transform a business. Harnessing the power of cloud-native firms can improve operational efficiency, increase scalability, and improve the overall performance of an organization.
What are the steps of application modernization?
For most enterprises, app modernization is the clear path forward. The question is not whether to modernize but “what” and “how” to modernize. To answer these crucial questions about their legacy applications, organizations need to understand their modernization options and have a deep insight into their applications.
#1: Create Goals for Modernization
Goals will always be the foundation of any strong strategy. Without goals, measuring the success of modernization efforts will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. You have to detail your goals for app modernization and link modernization efforts to measurable business outcomes. For example, greater agility and faster time-to-market with new features can show progress and success as a business embarks on its modernization journey.
Organizations should identify the highest priority and most critical applications to kick off the goal-setting process. From there, they should analyze how the company would benefit from increased reliability, scalability, and performance by leveraging their cloud service provider. Areas of impact can include revenue, market share churn, profitability, and more.
After an enterprise has clearly defined how current applications will impact their business success, they can then tie modernization objectives and priorities back to business outcomes.
#2: Understand Your Applications
Before a business can transform its applications, it must recognize its starting point. An organization should take a baseline measurement to understand how its applications are performing. This baseline allows businesses to identify and prioritize the best approach to application modernization for each app and will serve as the foundation for creating the road map for application modernization.
Companies must invest in an observability platform to aggregate, correlate and analyze performance data. Without this, they cannot make data-driven decisions because there is no true understanding of how an application is currently functioning and if modernization is improving it. Observability allows enterprises to capture data about each application to help understand their specific characteristics. This objective and holistic view of applications empowers organizations to decide how to best modernize an application.
#3: Determine the Optimal Modernization Approach for Each Application
After setting goals and collecting data, companies are ready to make data-driven decisions on modernizing their applications. There are three approaches to app modernization: rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring.
Rehosting entails shifting an application to a more modern environment, such as the cloud, to reap cost savings, performance improvements, and ease of operations. The changes only pertain to rehosting; therefore, this approach’s risk and impact are low.
Replatforming is when companies move an application and modify some infrastructure elements for time and resource-saving purposes. Replatforming requires taking an existing component of an application and moving it to a managed service with no changes to business logic. The risk is still low because of infrastructure modifications, but the impact is medium.
Refactoring requires businesses to re-architect an application to optimize and realize the full benefits of cloud services, architectures, and technologies. It allows for improved quality, performance, and the rapid delivery of innovative new features. Re-architecting applications require making code-level changes, so the risk of refactoring is high but ultimately yields a more significant impact.
#4: Observe and Optimize
Taking a baseline measurement in step two gives companies the data to make informed decisions and serves as a comparison during and after modernization efforts. Once the first modernization iteration is complete, organizations can track their goals and demonstrate success by comparing the previous baseline against current performance and other KPIs, such as business outcome data and customer experience. The hope is to see improvements and identify additional modernization opportunities to achieve peak cloud optimization.
Modernization is continuous
The strategy, as mentioned above, is a never-ending process and should be repeated. There will always be new tools and capabilities for companies to discover, incorporate, and support throughout app modernization.
Each iteration of modernization is an opportunity for enterprises to embrace digital transformation holistically. An application modernization strategy is not simply lifting and shifting platforms; it also reshapes an organization’s culture and processes necessary for truly modernizing a business.
2nd Watch offers a comprehensive consulting methodology and proven tools to accelerate your cloud-native and app modernization objectives. Our modernization process begins with a complete assessment of your existing application portfolio to identify which you should keep, replace, retire, or consolidate. We then develop and implement a modernization strategy that best meets your business needs. From application rationalization to application modernization to DevOps transformation and beyond, 2nd Watch is your go-to partner throughout your entire modernization journey.
Contact us to schedule a brief meeting with our specialists to discuss your current modernization objectives.
By Mary Ellen Cavanagh, 2nd Watch Sr. Solutions Marketing Manager, AppMod & DevOps
