Article
App Modernization: Strategic Leverage for Managing Rapid Change
The last few months of the COVID crisis have made this even more evident, dramatically exposing security faults and the limitations of outdated monolithic applications and costly on-premises infrastructure. This lack of modernization is preventing many businesses and agencies from adapting to new economic realities and finding a clear path forward.
Applications architected for the cloud provide flexibility to address scalability and performance challenges and to explore new opportunities without requiring heavy investment.
Whether improving efficiencies with a backend process or creating business value with a new customer-facing app, modernizing your IT solutions helps you respond quickly to changing conditions, reduce your compliance risk, and optimize costs to match your needs. Applications that are already architected to take advantage of the cloud also provide flexibility to address scalability and performance challenges as well as to explore new opportunities without disrupting budgets and requiring heavy investment.
First, what defines technologies that are NOT modern?
Maintaining legacy technologies is more expensive than modernizing them
Some of the most striking examples of the complexity, costs, and failures associated with legacy technologies have recently been seen in the public sector. In fact, some state unemployment systems have failed to handle the overwhelming increase in traffic and demand, impacting those in greatest need of assistance. There are those that are already taking measures within the public sector. Beth Cappello, acting CIO of the US Department of Homeland Security, recently stated that had her predecessors not taken steps to modernize their infrastructure and adopt cloud technologies, the ability for DHS personnel to remain connected during the pandemic would have been severely impacted.
Many government applications run on 30+ year-old mainframe computers using an antiquated programming language, creating a desperate need for COBOL developers to fix the crippled technologies. What the situation reveals is the dire need to replatform, refactor, and rearchitect these environments to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and performance of the cloud.
Benefits of modernization:
The realities of preparing for the unknown
As a result of shelter-in-place orders since early March, we have seen both the success of customers who have modernized as well as the struggles of those still in the process of migrating to the cloud.
Food for All is a customer with a farm-to-table grocery app that experienced a 400x increase in revenue as people rushed to sign up for their service during the first few weeks of the pandemic. Because we had already built their architecture for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, the company’s technology environment was able to scale easily to meet demand. In addition, they have a reliable DevOps environment that allowed them to immediately onboard more developers to begin building and publishing new features based on user feedback.
Unfortunately, other customers have not been able to adapt as quickly.
When one of our retail clients lost a large number of customers in the wake of COVID, they needed help scaling down their environment as rapidly as possible to cut their costs on AWS. However, the inherited architecture had been written almost 10 years ago, making it expensive and painfully time-consuming to implement adjustments or changes. As a result, the company is currently weighing whether to turn off their app and lose revenue or invest in modernizing it to recover their customers.
In fact, many early cloud adopters have not revisited their initial architectures to ensure they are taking advantage of the hundreds of new features and services released by AWS each year
For another large enterprise customer, the need to reduce technology costs meant laying off a third of their payroll. Though our team is helping them make progress on refactoring their AWS workloads, they were still unable to scale down 90% of their applications in time to avoid such a difficult decision. The situation has significantly increased their urgency to modernize.
The need for a cloud-first modernization service provider
With AWS now 14 years old, it is important to realize that modernization is just as important to early adopters as it is for the public sector’s legacy workloads. In fact, many early cloud adopters have not revisited their initial architectures to ensure they are taking advantage of the hundreds of new features and services released by AWS each year (during Andy Jassy’s 2019 re:Invent keynote alone, he announced 30 new capabilities in 3 hours). For these reasons, and many more, our Modernization Engineers help customers make regular assessments of their cloud infrastructure and workloads to maintain a forward-looking, modern IT estate.
Whether migrating out of an on-premise data center or colo, rearchitecting an existing cloud workload, or developing with new cloud-native features,it has never been more important to implement a modern cloud strategy. This is particularly true for optimizing services across your organization and embracing security as a core pillar.
According to Gartner, 99% of cloud security failures through 2025 will be the customer’s fault. Clearly, no organization wants to be a part of this statistic. Ongoing management of your critical workloads is a worthy investment that ensures your mission-critical assets are secure. The truth is that if security isn’t done right, it simply doesn’t matter.
We work frequently with customers looking to completely exit their data center infrastructure and migrate to an OPEX model in the cloud. In these engagements, we identify risks and dependencies using a staged approach to ensure the integrity of data and functionality of applications. However, this migration or “evacuation” is not an end state. In fact, it is often the first major milestone on a client’s journey toward continuous improvement and optimization. It is also nearly impossible to do efficiently without modern technology and the cloud.
Modern cloud management mitigates risk and enables modernization
While some workloads and applications may be considered cloud-ready for a relatively straightforward lift and shift migration, they can usually benefit from refactoring, rearchitecting, or replatforming based on a thorough assessment of usage patterns. Cloud adoption on its own will only go so far to improve performance and organizational flexibility.
Effectual is a Modernization Service Provider that understands how to modernize applications, their metrics, operational costs, security implications, and compliance requirements
A modern digital strategy allows you to unlock the true capabilities of the cloud, increasing scalability, agility, efficiency, and one of the most critical benefits of any modernization initiative – improved security. Modernized technologies can also utilize cutting edge security protocols and continuous compliance tools that are simply not available with physical infrastructure.
Unlike traditional MSPs (Managed Service Providers) who manage on-premises servers in physical data centers, Effectual is a cloud-first Modernization Service Provider that understands how to modernize applications, their metrics, operational costs, security implications, and compliance requirements. When our development team finishes a project, our customers can Cloud Confidently™ knowing that their environment is in experienced hands for ongoing management.
Most importantly, the path to modernization is not necessarily linear, whether you are developing an application specifically for the cloud, refactoring or rearchitecting as part of a data center migration, or updating and securing an existing cloud environment. New ideas, priorities, and changes to the world we live in require that we adapt, innovate, and rethink our approach to solving business challenges in even the most uncertain times.
When your organization or team needs the power to pivot, we have the Modernization Engineers, systems, tools, and processes to support that change.
Ready to begin your modernization journey?
Contact us to get started.
