There are many paths towards modernization: your organization could replatform the applications to the cloud and integrate with advanced, high-value services subsequently, or you could start from scratch by building new applications specifically for the cloud.
These decisions are specific to your company and depend on your business goals. The retail industry, for example, is seeing benefits as they migrate their workloads to the Cloud to provide a more personalized customer shopping experience. Retailers can collect and analyze customers’ shopping patterns and make recommendations on additional purchasing options.
The decision to migrate or modernize is a big one. You may have some questions, including:
We will answer some of these questions in the following paragraphs.
Keeping up with the speed of change in the business world is challenging. Technology is opening entirely new markets and creating innovative ways to serve customers. More and more organizations push digital innovation beyond experimentation to drive competitive advantage and continuously deliver value. At the same time, app-driven disruption provides exponential growth opportunities.
To start your migration and modernization journey, you’ll want to assess your current portfolio of applications and data assets, as well as their relationship to your company’s business functions. The goal is to determine where the current suite of applications fits in your long-term digital strategy and how well it supports evolving business models.
An Application Portfolio Assessment helps an organization better understand its existing application environment. The assessment focuses on understanding an application’s business value and technical characteristics. These dimensions will help define the modernization technique to be used and the potential business value of the modernization approach.
You’ll want to first assess your current applications, prioritize their value, plan their future use, and execute on this plan.
Just as your current assets were built or acquired over a long period of time, application modernization should be a gradual change. You can consult with a Microsoft partner, such as Zitec, to assist with your application portfolio assessment.
One of the primary goals of an assessment is to chart a transformation path for each application in the portfolio using, for instance, the “6R’s of application migration” methodology. Based on this framework, for each application in your portfolio you can decide to take one of the following paths.
Based on our previous experience, each company operates a significant number of redundant digital assets that can simply be decommissioned
Certain apps are black boxes and changes can no longer be made to them without affecting their stability. These applications should ideally be left unchanged and a replacement plan should be prepared for each one.
Rehosting is also referred to as a lift-and-shift migration. The application is moved from an on-premises server into the IaaS environment of Azure, avoiding modifications to the system. With this approach, cloud benefits are quickly unlocked, and you can take advantage of advanced cloud capabilities, such as autoscaling and improved resiliency, while gradually modernizing afterwards.
Microsoft has designed the Azure IaaS solution to offer a large set of advantages, just by lifting-and-shifting an application into the cloud:
Replatforming is our preferred tactic when migrating applications to the cloud because it allows companies to quickly achieve tangible benefits without investing significant resources. By adopting managed cloud services that provide a cloud-based equivalent of frequently used products such as relational databases or in-memory caches, organizations can reduce administrative costs and increase uptime.
Move certain workloads that might be operated (or even developed) by your organization to a SaaS equivalent. For instance, you could replace your self-managed project management tool with Jira Cloud or your CRM with Zoho CRM.
Alter your application’s architecture to use cloud-native features and services such as serverless functions. This enables seamless application scaling, while also significantly reducing operating expenses, but comes with a relatively high implementation/adoption cost.
We prefer to take a pragmatic approach and encourage organizations to start with one of the 5 R’s that precede refactoring and then plan for an incremental refactoring of the applications in order to benefit from cloud-native services.
There are several cloud service models you can choose from, including IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and you can move at your own pace.
With the right approach, you can modernize a portfolio of applications in the right way, yielding value more quickly and at a lower cost. This makes it easier and less expensive to stay up-to-date, as products and technologies continue to evolve.
Containers are a packaging mechanism in which applications are abstracted from the environment in which they run, allowing your applications to be more portable.
There are a few benefits to the use of containers to ‘wrap’ or containerize existing programs, including the ability to minimize complexity by using abstractions from containers. Containers eliminate dependencies on the underlying infrastructure services, thus reducing the difficulty of dealing with the platforms involved. This implies that access to resources, such as storage or applications, can be abstracted. This makes the application portable, but also speeds up application refactoring, as much of the access to native cloud resources is handled by the containers.
There are also other advantages to containerization to take into consideration:
In a microservices architecture, the application is composed of small, independent services. Here are some of the defining characteristics of microservices:
Done correctly, microservices can provide several benefits:
Agility
Microservices are deployed independently, it’s easier to manage bug fixes and feature releases. You can update a service without redeploying the entire application and roll back an update if something goes wrong.
Small code, small teams
A microservice should be small enough that a single feature team can build, test, and deploy it. Small code bases are easier to understand.
Mix of technologies
Teams can pick the technology that best fits their service, using a mix of technology stacks as appropriate.
Resiliency
If an individual microservice becomes unavailable, it won’t disrupt the entire application, as long as any upstream microservices are designed to handle faults correctly (for example, by implementing circuit breaking).
Scalability
Microservices architecture allows each microservice to be scaled independently of the others. That lets you scale out subsystems that require more resources, without scaling out the entire application.
Data isolation
It is much easier to perform schema updates, because only a single microservice is impacted.
The application and infrastructure migration and modernization process allows you to take advantage of the Cloud and positions your organization for success. Azure offers modern infrastructure for all workloads, true hybrid capabilities, and secure and well-managed solutions. It is also cost-effective across the board.
Whether you are looking for a technology partner to drive your company’s growth or a security provider to safeguard your assets, our team would be happy to assist you with your challenges.