Do you remember buying your last laptop? It had the most up-to-date software at the time, but it may not be able to keep pace with the latest technological advancements. Now you have two options, either you buy a new laptop or upgrade the same laptop by increasing its RAM and storage capacity to keep up with the latest technology. Apply the same analogy in an organization's context. Building the technology stack from scratch in an organization can be very costly and time taking. So organizations have the option to modernize their existing apps, that too in stages.
Companies are transforming the way they interact and transact to meet the market requirements. Modern businesses need to modernize their application portfolios to improve user experience and their overall business operations. Enterprise cloud-native application modernization is globally considered a strategic move to keep up with the ever-changing customer needs.
It is important to identify and manage cloud application modernization challenges for continued growth. This is more complex for the big enterprises than for the new age enterprises. It requires a comprehensive approach towards refreshing data and re-architecting the underlying code. This is an area where businesses can take the help of a company that provides Application Modernization Services.
Modernization is no longer a choice. It is the necessity of the hour. Organizations can invent new models and expand their business with agility. Taking that into consideration, let us look at 10 principles that can help in building a successful Application Modernization Roadmap.
Align the Application Modernization Roadmap with Business Capabilities
To achieve optimum business value while undergoing digital transformation, it is important to identify and prioritize your business capabilities to align with your long-term growth strategy. Focus on new capabilities that are customer-centric. This will help drive revenue while accelerating innovation.
Rationalize your Application Portfolio
Once your strategy is defined you need to decide how to onboard apps to your cloud infrastructure. Here’s when Application Portfolio Rationalization (APR) comes handy. It involves categorizing applications and rationalizing apps using CMI (Contain, Maintain and Invest) techniques and 6R Analysis (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Rewrite, Retain and Retire).
The CMI framework and 6R go hand in hand. The applications which require minimal investment in support, enhancement and release falls under CONTAIN. Applications requiring major enhancements and upgrades, and have high ticket volume fall into MAINTAIN. Whereas, INVEST applications are strategic and can be value generators. Re-engineering or rewriting these applications brings a higher return on investment (ROI).
Enable your Workforce with Emerging Technologies
As much as rationalizing applications is vital for organizational growth, enabling your workforce with new ways of working is equally important. The thing is, cloud-native application modernization is all about updating your technology portfolio to ensure quick and continuous delivery. Modernized applications are built and run on agile principles, automated DevOps pipelines, etc. Hence, cloud adoption and cloud-native development requires skilled engineering teams.
Establish an Engineering Culture
Taking into consideration the time taken for the application modernization initiative to complete, you need to invest and nurture the right mindset in your project teams. It is important to have an engineering culture that works towards modernizing value streams rather than merely addressing specific applications. Moreover, engineering teams need to understand and master software craftsmanship by adopting extreme programming practices.
Streamline Processes and Invest in New Features
For successful application modernization, you need to eliminate redundancies and invest in new features or application user experiences based on human-centric design principles. This requires a systematic process to identify and eliminate redundant tasks. It is important to optimize your modernization efforts toward meaningful features and user experiences for a long-term increase in the value of application portfolios.
While undergoing application modernization journey your security can be at stake. Here’s a comprehensive guide to Cloud security solutions and services that you should have to stay secure.
Identify Performance Baselines and KPIs
All these modernization initiatives can only be justified by numbers. The problems and challenges that obstruct application modernization benefits should be identified and mapped to clear, specific and measurable KPIs. This helps in cost-benefit analysis, goal monitoring and timely corrections. To measure the IT outcomes of such initiatives, you can use the performance baseline of legacy systems. Also, the performance indicators must be aligned with technical business goals such as, number of active users, geographies, revenue impacts, customer satisfaction scores, scalability and uptime.
Measure and Upgrade Initiatives According to a Pre-defined Maturity Path
Once your performance indicators are set, it's time to define a maturity path to measure the influence level of application modernization initiatives. This determines the success of your overall digital strategy. By defining a maturity path, you can easily identify new opportunities and maximize the ROI. For an instance, A program may begin by addressing some specific business problem, move ahead with organizational level problem, enable them to enter new markets and finally allow the launch of new business models.
Modernize your Data
Data modernization creates a robust foundation that facilitates data analysis and leads to business insights and intelligence. It involves updating the data architecture, certifying data security, redesigning schema, eliminating redundancy, resolving data quality issues and tuning performance.
Create Opportunities for New Business Models
With application modernization initiatives, you can identify systems of record that may have the potential to become systems of engagement. Similarly, a system of engagement application may have the potential to result in a system of insight application or product. You can unlock new business value with these opportunities.
Build New Digital Products
Application modernization is not limited to updating existing applications; it also focuses on identifying white spaces. It could result in new enhanced digital products that are able to yield new business models. By mapping the value stream of your business capabilities, you can identify white spaces. Optimize and strengthen your value stream with experience-driven digital products.
It’s a Journey Not a Sprint
Application modernization is critical to many well-established businesses. Doing it right can help them to sustain and win, despite the deep-seated organizational, technological and business challenges. By following these 10 application modernization principles, organizations can operate with agility and hence improve revenue and profits, reduce costs, augment staff productivity and customer experience. They can enhance scalability and accessibility, improve speed and security, extend IT agility and arm the workforce with the right culture to succeed in application modernization.
Not following these principles could lead to delayed ROI, limiting market share and innovation, high-end costs, low productivity and bad customer experiences. Now that you have understood the benefits of application modernization check out aspects of infrastructure modernization on cloud.
Start your Application Modernization Journey with Cloud4C
With digital capabilities more essential than ever, a legacy app infrastructure could seriously hinder competitiveness. With our experience and expertise, we enable established businesses to unlock trapped value and position them for the future.
Cloud4C is the world’s largest end-to-end application-focused cloud managed service provider. We provide a transformative application modernization experience for hyper-agile performance and flexibility. Get industry-leading availability, scalability, smart security, and uninterrupted resilience of your modernized applications. Accelerate your organizational process life cycles including DevOps, app go-to-market timelines at best ROI. Explore our full-scale application modernization services here. To take our application modernization assessment, talk to our experts today!
