Cloud Modernization: A strategic investment for organization

Moving to Cloud, or Cloud Migration can be achieved in several ways. Most of these approaches involve lifting and shifting. To be specific, businesses tend to use their legacy applications and on-premises databases by just aligning them to modern requirements and IT infrastructure. A sophisticated, less popular, time-consuming – but much more promising approach – would be to progressively transform business applications, databases, workloads, processes, and infrastructure for the Cloud-native environment. This approach is referred to as Cloud Modernization.

Let’s explain why modernizing legacy systems and migrated workloads is a perfect strategic investment for your enterprise. What makes Cloud Modernization beneficial?

There are dozens of Cloud modernization benefits that can inspire an organization to go for it. A few of them are:

● High-performing systems

Cloud-native or Cloud-first solutions are much more performant than the legacy lift-and-shift solutions sitting in your Cloud. With them, you get advanced features and trending abilities, giving you an edge over your business rivals.

● Reliable Infrastructure

The chances of a legacy system breaking are much higher than a modernized application not functioning at a critical moment. Also, finding experts to troubleshoot an old monolithic application is a tricky job for sure. Modernizing your apps and documenting them better is a solid step towards building a reliable and fault-tolerant IT infrastructure.

● Better Scalability

Old applications utilizing your on-premises database might not be the best for your scaling needs and growing customer base. However, if you will modernize them for Cloud, the scaling ability of your deployments will be significantly good.

● Lower long-term expenses

Legacy apps, if not re-factored for Cloud, reduce the visibility and abilities of your IT infrastructure. Such migrated solutions add extra costs instead of reducing expenses. The system updates, bug-fixing, and troubleshooting for such solutions are must costlier too. Modernizing these applications for Cloud may seem expensive initially, but it is much more cost-effective in the long run. ● The Storage & Database Advantage

When your application is not modernized, your options for migrating database and storage space are limited. Cloud platforms, on the contrary, give you high flexibility in this regard. The freedom to choose database/storage as per your budget and performance needs is a great privilege.

The roadblock: Cloud Modernization challenges

Alright. So from the previous section, it is very much visible that Cloud modernization is a super-beneficial bargain. However, enterprises have their legit reasons to hesitate. The challenges involved in the modernization process are the culprit.

• It could be disruptive: Most enterprises avoid going for modernization until the legacy technology retires or something breaks because they fear the process interrupting their regular business operations and affecting the end-users/customers.

• Unnecessary cost: There are businesses that believe their applications are fine if they’re not non-functional or without broken components. This shortsighted decision bars them from availing of great-performing, more feature-rich, and advanced applications.

• Time and resource Investment: Well, Cloud Modernization is indeed a time and resource-intensive process. And businesses are mostly not ready to take this bet instantly. Postponement of the plan slowly results in its cancellation.

Cloud modernization consultation: The first step to take

Modernizing your Cloud cannot be called an end goal; it’s the one big step towards boosting business agility, performance, flexibility, visibility, scalability, productivity, and revenue. So, it is always suggested to involve an expert (or an expert team) while you do so. Hiring Cloud Modernization consultants, for example, makes an ideal deal. How to go about modernizing your Cloud?

Once you have discussed your requirements with the consultant and understood your organization’s Cloud infrastructure, it’s time to think about what is best suited for your business before you actually start modernizing your applications and infrastructure. In case you’re wondering what should be your next step after consultation, here is what we would suggest -

● Set your priorities and modernization scope

After gaining enough knowledge about modernization and complete visibility inside your IT infrastructure, you must brainstorm about your priorities as per your budget and commitments.

Ask yourself:

• Which applications require modernization and why;

• How much downtime is acceptable for which Cloud component;

• Which modules of those applications should be modernized on priority;

• Which Cloud components need to be updated;

• Which technologies are being used in your apps are retiring soon, and so on.

● Hire Cloud Modernization experts

Cloud modernization is mostly a well-thought and planned process, especially when carried out by experts. Applications are carefully and gradually re-factored to ensure the least downtime and visible effects considering business operations and end-users. So, instead of investing your in-house resources in this exhaustive process, take the help of an experienced and productive Cloud Modernization services provider.

It’s time to make this strategic investment NOW

One underrated advantage of Cloud Modernization is the fact that it helps you avoid hurried and flawed migrations. For example, if you are using an outdated system and it suddenly announces its exit from the market, your team will have to compromise on various fronts.

From finding migration/updation experts to deploying it through a new technology/version, everything will be for keeping your system live. It will invite threats, errors, flaws, bad user experience, and whatnot.

By opting for Cloud Modernization on time, your organization will have enough time to make the perfect re-factoring plan, choose the right deployment strategy, standardize every related process, consider security requirements, and enhance its existing features. Therefore, your modernized application will be the best version of your old application with the advantages of the Cloud