It doesn’t matter which cloud strategy you believe in. It could be a more gradual and incremental approach. Fine. Modernization, though, is necessary regardless of your choice. Without modernization, Cloud is simply a transfer of data from one data center to another, leaving all the issues of legacy infrastructures behind.
According to Forrester’s research, the expectations of saving money by lifting and shifting workloads to the public Cloud are either lost or mislaid. Moving IT investment from capital expense to operational expense has a limited number of perks or other advantages for businesses. The true commercial value of the Cloud is adding speed and scale to an organization’s IT operations, which calls for significant organizational and technical transformation.
Modernization revolves around maximizing the advantages of the Cloud, particularly cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and serverless. Here are five approaches for IT leaders to modernize their Cloud.
First things first – Why is cloud modernization crucial?
Cloud no longer exclusively refers to the services provided by hyper scale cloud vendors. Instead, it consists of a number of approaches for application development and modern infrastructure technologies. Although they can also operate in private cloud and hybrid setups, they are either triggered or accelerated by Cloud.
Organizations today must decide not only where to run workloads but also how. Modernization must therefore be a key component of Cloud today.
Fix old-school replatforms
Lifting and shifting technologies seem to be a great idea. It is a good place to start but a poor place to end. If data center expenses are too high or the cloud provider offers more reliability, moving 40-year-old systems to the Cloud may have some advantages. However, if programs are ineffective and challenging to upgrade before replatforming, they will also be ineffective and challenging to upgrade in the Cloud.
Replatforming was frequently the only workable cloud solution some years ago. But now, it is considered pricey and outdated. However, the point is that the whole modernization process will be more challenging the longer those outdated, replatformed programs remain.
Modernize and then move
Large enterprises that adopted the Cloud slowly benefit from what early adopters have learned. They are tackling the problem of modernization first rather than simply throwing their applications into the public Cloud.
The main emphasis is on containerizing existing program when it is feasible and developing and delivering new apps using containers, which bundle an application along with all of its dependencies. On-premises multi-cloud container platforms can often operate on all the main public clouds. Later, those containerized apps can be modified to function on platforms for public cloud containers as well.
Leverage cloud-native capabilities
Some businesses have chosen to replatform before migrating to the Cloud and modernizing with cloud services. Sometimes, replacing a database with a managed database service is a simple process. Modernization increasingly focuses on utilizing cloud-native features to integrate serverless into apps and orchestrate containers at scale with Kubernetes.
When a small number of apps are upgraded initially to serve as a success model, such projects are most successful. New tools are available for developers, and operators have the chance to reorganize into platform teams. It’s crucial to have those early experiences before tackling applications that are more challenging to upgrade.
Explore SaaS
Entire application categories, including human resources, are now dominated by Software as a Service (SaaS). Enterprise resource planning and other large, core applications are increasingly in the attention of SaaS providers. SaaS for such apps is becoming increasingly popular among enterprise IT departments due to its ability to free up resources previously required for labour-intensive and complicated updates.
Expect more SaaS to fall under the radar of IT leaders, frequently at the request of business units which are enthused about, say, a certain SaaS supplier of customer relationship management.
Rebuild as containerized apps
Many technologies are available to help customers extract the business logic from their older programs and rebuild them as containerized apps running in Cloud or hybrid environments. Sometimes it isn’t worth the effort and money to modernize current applications. New cloud-native apps have replaced core programs that were once challenging monoliths.
Low-code apps are also impacting this area, thanks to platforms that empower beginner developers to respond to client needs in the most effective way. In the rebuild scenario, resources may be used up front, but performance and experiences may be greatly improved.
Conclusion
It’s crucial to remember that various cloud modernization strategies don’t compete with one another. According to their demands in a specific business unit or with a public cloud provider, many organizations pursue the majority or all of them at once. This reflects a growing understanding that the goal is IT modernization and that the Cloud is typically the best way to do it.
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