The Enterprise Guide to Continuous Application Modernization

Organizations that can achieve peak performance from their core business applications are the ones that can effectively grow, compete, and differentiate themselves. However, many such apps were written quite a few years back, even decades ago.

Over time, most of them start facing various issues, from outdated tech stack to degrading user experience, from data breaches to expensive maintenance. And so, devising an efficient application modernization strategy is necessary to ensure these mission-critical systems stay updated and relevant in this day and age.

What Is Continuous Application Modernization?

Continuous modernization is an iterative and gradual process. It gives businesses the prompt support and value they need. Continuous application modernization addresses the challenges faced by businesses due to technological debts. This ensures that ongoing business doesn’t face any business disruption.

As seen in the picture above, you can clearly see that in continuous modernization, you can develop or upgrade applications quickly, release them frequently and quickly, and test, monitor, and refine them continuously.

Talking metaphorically, earlier, we used to keep track of finances using ledger books. As businesses and technology advanced, we stuck with spreadsheets. Now cloud-based applications like SAP are helping in scalability improvements. 

Why Modernize?

There isn't much of a choice as to whether to modernize or not for the majority of businesses that weren't "born" digital and are, therefore, unprepared to utilize all the latest cloud technology. Competitors leveraging technology will be more agile, responsive, and innovative and will win the race if your infrastructure, technology, applications, and method of developing software are still stuck in the past. Today's large legacy companies need to change swiftly to be competitive and relevant. That’s why applications need modernization to deliver and stand up to modern-day customers’ expectations. 

What Are the Benefits of Continuous Modernization?

There are a few benefits of continuous modernization that one needs to be aware of:

1. Achieves better results: To prevent downtime from impacting crucial business activities, replacing decade-old legacy software takes thoughtful and lengthy planning. Interdependencies between infrastructure and applications frequently result in unanticipated issues. Big-bang modernization of complex application environments can easily significantly raise the risk of failure. The ability to gradually migrate ensures long-lasting components of large applications in a sustainable manner.

2. High scope of innovation: To succeed in the current competitive industry, the appropriate balance between maintenance and innovation is essential. Continuous application modernization fosters discovery and innovation more quickly than any conventional legacy application modernization strategy since it stresses smaller, incremental approaches.

3. Avoids application retirement: Applications must be current in terms of both technology and infrastructure in order to succeed and remain competitive. Continuous application modernization makes use of contemporary technologies and guarantees that you are always one step ahead of the competition to prevent issues with early retirement.

Modernizing Applications With Azure

Azure provides multiple choices for hosting your applications like; Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS), Containers-as-a-Service(CaaS), and Serverless. Azure provides you with flexibility according to your business needs. For example: 

• If you are concerned about re-platforming your ASP.net site, you can leverage Azure app services.
• For restructuring your legacy applications to microservices, you can leverage Azure Kubernetes Services. AKS helps you gain more control over your containerized application and its infrastructure.
• For running web-based applications, Azure has a dedicated service known as Azure App Service. Azure App Service supports all the standard frameworks, and you can run your applications by using Windows and Linux-based containers.
• Application, database, and infrastructure discovery, evaluation, rightsizing, and migration to Azure are all possible with Azure Migrate services.

Modernizing Applications With AWS

The AWS cloud offers a variety of alternatives for hosting and updating apps. You can replatform those workloads to AWS-managed services such as the Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) using AWS Fargate. By using container solutions like Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS or event-driven serverless compute services like AWS Lambda, you can create new, secure apps using serverless architecture. When teams have no restrictions on the current instances or container platforms and concentrate largely on building code, customers pick AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda provides the highest level of abstraction from infrastructure, allowing users to carry out releases more quickly.

How IBM Cloud Partnered With Google Cloud to Deliver Continuous Modernization

IBM approaches continuous modernization through an application portfolio transformation program. The software utilizes the IBM Garage Methodology's guiding principles to carry out continuous modernization and iterative IT modernization. You can deliver on crucial business outcomes and maintain an up-to-date portfolio by using analytics to make educated decisions. These actions are carried out in two simplified phases:

1. Intake phase: The IBM team employs a collection of technologies called Delivery Curator during the intake phase to provide an accurate image of your IT system. It's a  pattern-driven system that ingests data and offers suggested target migration patterns, such as workbooks, timelines, personnel estimations, and squad-configuration recommendations.
2. Factory phase: For typical cases, the factory phase is in charge of designing and executing migration and workload transformation. This phase includes the design and planning processes as well as the construction, testing, and relocating of particular applications. This stage involves a thorough study, the discovery of modernization patterns, and the creation of the execution strategy.

Conclusion

Application evaluation and data alignment are two aspects of continuous modernization that guarantee the correct decisions are made at the appropriate time. For firms to adopt current technologies and consistently provide value, ongoing efforts and reviews are necessary.

When your technology and platforms become outdated, continuous modernization accelerates decision-making and prevents the need to start from scratch when developing new applications.

From my perspective, I have tried to narrate the core What, Why, and How organizations are leveraging continuous application modernization. In case you have any questions in mind, feel free to approach me in the comments section below.