Digital transformation Archives

4 Must-Have Steps to Application Modernization Success

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.

Application modernization is much more than simply migrating to cloud-based workloads. It is the total transformation of an organization’s culture, tools, and processes. Below is a step-by-step strategy for continuous application modernization:

#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.

By Mary Ellen Cavanagh, 2nd Watch Sr. Solutions Marketing Manager, AppMod & DevOps

Riding the Digital Transformation: Why Enterprises Are Reengineering Their Cloud Infrastructure

Post 2020, how are you approaching the cloud? The rapid and unexpected digital transformation of 2020 forced enterprises worldwide to quickly mobilize workers using cloud resources. Now, as the world returns to an altered normal, it’s time for organizations to revisit their cloud infrastructure components with a fresh perspective. Hybrid work environments, industry transformations, changing consumer behavior, and growing cyber threats have all effected the way we do business. Now it might be time to change your cloud.

Risk mitigation at scale

Avoiding potential missteps in your strategy requires both wide and narrow insights. With the right cloud computing infrastructure, network equipment, and operating systems, organizations can achieve better risk mitigation and management with cloud scalability. As you continue to pursue business outcomes, you have to solve existing problems, as well as plan for the future. Some of these problems include:

Scaling your cloud platform and infrastructure services quickly to keep up with increasing and/or unexpected demand.
Maximizing cloud computing services and computing power to accommodate storage, speed, and resource demands.
Prioritizing new and necessary investments and delivery models within a fixed budget.
Innovating faster to remain, or gain, competitive advantage.

Overall, to avoid risk, you need to gain efficiency, and that’s what the cloud can do. Cloud infrastructure, applications, and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are designed to decrease input, and increase output and effectiveness. The scalability of cloud services allows enterprises to continue growing and innovating, without requiring heavy investments. With continuous cloud optimization, you’re positioned to adapt, innovate, and succeed regardless of the unknown future.

Application modernization for data leverage

Much of the digital transformation started with infrastructure modernization and the development of IaaS as a base line. Now, application modernization is accelerating alongside a changing migration pattern. What used to be simply ‘lift and shift’ is now ‘lift and evolve.’ Enterprises want to collaborate with cloud experts to gain a deeper understanding of applications as they become more cloud native. With a constant pipeline of new applications and services, organizations need guidance to avoid cloud cost sprawl and streamline environment integration.

As application modernization continues, organizations are gaining access to massive amounts of data that are enabling brand new opportunities. This requires a new look at database architectures to make sure you’re unlocking value internally and potentially, externally. While application modernization and database architecture are interconnected, they can also transform separately. We’re starting to see people recognize the importance of strategic cloud transformations that include the entire data footprint – whether it’s the underlying architecture, or the top level analytics.

Organizations are getting out of long-term licensing agreements, monetizing their data, gaining flexibility, cutting costs, and driving innovation, customer value, and revenue. Data is pulled from, and fed into, a lot of different applications within constantly changing cloud environments, which brings both challenges and opportunities. Enterprises must transform from this to that, but the end goal is constantly changing as well. Therefore continuous motion is necessary within the digital transformation.

Changing core business strategies

One thing is for sure about the digital transformation – it’s not slowing down. Most experts agree that even after pandemic safety precautions are eliminated, the digital transformation will continue to accelerate. After seeing the speed of adoption and opportunities in the cloud, many enterprises are reevaluating the future with new eyes. Budgets for IT are expanding, but so is the IT skills gap and cybersecurity incidents. These transitions present questions in a new light, and enterprises should revisit their answers.

Why do you still have your own physical data center?
What is the value in outsourcing? And insourcing?
How has your risk profile changed?
How does data allow you to focus on your core business strategy?

Answering these questions has more enterprises looking to partner with, and learn from, cloud experts – as opposed to just receiving services. Organizations want and need to work alongside cloud partners to close the skills gap within their enterprise, gain skills for internal expansion in the future, and better understand how virtualized resources can improve their business. It’s also a way to invest in your employees to reduce turn-over and encourage long-term loyalty.

Security and compliance

At this point with security, compliance, and ensuring business continuity, enterprises must have solutions in place. There is no other way. Ransomware and phishing attacks have been rising in sophistication and frequency year-over-year, with a noticeable spike since remote work became mainstream. Not only does your internal team need constant training and regular enforcement of governance policies, but there’s a larger emphasis on how your network protections are set up.

Regardless of automation and controls, people will make mistakes and there is an inherent risk in any human activity. In fact, human error is the leading cause of data loss with approximately 88% of all data breaches caused by an employee mistake. Unfortunately, the possibility of a breaches is often made possible because of your internal team. Typically, it’s the manner in which the cloud is configured or architected that creates a loophole for bad actors. It’s not that the public cloud isn’t secure or compliant, it’s that it’s not set up properly. This is where many enterprises are outsourcing data protection to avoid damaging compliance penalties, guarantee uninterrupted business continuity, and maintain the security of sensitive data after malicious or accidental deletion, natural disaster, or in the event that a device is lost, stolen or damaged.

Next steps: Think about day two

Enterprises who think of cloud migration as a one-and-done project – we were there, and now we’re here – aren’t ready to make the move. The cloud is not the answer. The cloud is an enabler to help organizations get the answers necessary to move in the direction they desire. There are risks associated with moving to the cloud – tools can distract from goals, system platforms need support, load balancers have to be implemented, and the cloud has to be leveraged and optimized to be beneficial long-term. Without strategizing past the migration, you won’t get the anticipated results.

It can seem overwhelming to take on the constantly changing cloud (and it certainly can be), but you don’t have to do it alone! Keep up with the pace and innovation of the digital transformation, while focusing on what you do best – growing your enterprise – by letting the experts help. 2nd Watch has a team of trusted cloud advisors to help you navigate cloud complexities for successful and ongoing cloud modernization. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Partner, a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner, and a Google Cloud Partner with over 10 years’ experience, 2nd Watch provides ongoing advisory services to some of the largest companies in the world. Contact Us to take the next step in your cloud journey!

-Michael Elliott, Director of Marketing

The Democratization of IT | Madden NFL for the Technology Industry

A colleague of mine postulated that the IT department would eventually go the way of the dinosaur. He put forward that as Everything-as-a-Service model becomes the norm, IT would no longer provide meaningful value to the business. My flippant response was to point out that they have been saying that mainframes are dead for decades.

This of course doesn’t get to the heart of the conversation. What is the future role of IT as we move towards the use of Everything-as-a-Service? Will marketing, customer services, finance and other departments continue to look to IT for their application deployment? Will developers and engineers move to containerization to build and release code, turning to a DevOps model where the Ops are simply a cloud provider?

We’ve already proven that consumers can adapt to very complex applications. Every day when you deploy and use an application on your phone, you are operating at a level of complexity that once required IT assistance. And yes, the development of intuitive UXs has enabled this trend, however the same principal is occurring at the enterprise level. Cloud, in many ways, has already brought this simplification forward. It has democratized IT.

So, what is the future of IT? What significant disruptions to operations processes will occur through democratization? I liken it to the evolution of eSports (Madden NFL). You don’t manage each player on the field. You choose the skill players for the team, then run the plays. The only true decision you make is which offensive play to run, or which defensive scheme to set. In IT terms, you review the field (operations), orchestrate the movement of resources, and ensure the continuation of the applications looking for any potential issues and resolving them before they become an issue. This is the future of IT.

What are the implications? I believe IT evolves into a higher order (read more business value) function. They enable digital transformation, not from a resource perspective, but from a strategic business empowerment perspective. They get out of the job that keeps them from being strategic, the tactical day to day of managing resources, to enabling and implementing business strategy.

However, that takes a willingness to specifically allocate how IT is contributing to the business value output/increase at some very granular levels. To achieve this, it might require reengineering teams, architectures, and budgets to tightly link specific IT contributions to specific business outputs. The movement to modern cloud technology supports this fundamental shift, and over time, will soon start to solve chronic problems of underfunding or lack of support for ongoing improvement. IT is not going the way of the dinosaur. They’re becoming the fuel that enables business to grow strategically.

Want more tips on how to empower IT to contribute to growing your business strategy? Contact us

-Michael Elliott, Sr Director of Product Marketing

The 'Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap' Poster

Intellyx’s new Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster is here! The poster lays out the steps necessary for enterprises to align with customer preferences by implementing change as a core competency and features five main focus areas: customer experience, enterprise IT, agile architecture, devops, and big data.

“While digital transformation begins with a customer-focused technology transformation, in reality, it represents end-to-end business transformation as organizations establish change as a core competency,” says Jason Bloomberg, president of Intellyx and contributor to Forbes. “The Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster illustrates the complex, intertwined steps enterprises must take to achieve the benefits of digital transformation.”

The poster is the companion to Jason Bloomberg’s forthcoming book, Agile Digital Transformation, due in 2017. This book will lay out a practical approach for digitally transforming organizations to be more agile and innovative.

As an official sponsor of the poster, we’re giving you the download for free – enjoy!

Download the Poster

-Nicole Maus, Marketing Manager