Getting your organization digitally transformed can be an empowering experience. It can help drive innovation, reduce costs, boost agility, and facilitate data-driven decisions. To achieve true digital transformation, enterprises must leverage digital technologies. However, IT infrastructure and out-of-date applications often prevent us from progressing. The innovative technological leaps like artificial intelligence, connected devices, automation, remote collaboration and communications platforms need refinement after some time. Every new trend or technology brings in the need to improve. Now is the time to embrace the cloud modernization strategy that collaborates with people, processes, and technology. How? Let’s explore that.
Implementing a coordinated strategy for cloud modernization
Cloud adoption failures may have been caused by organizations that implemented it piecemeal. Business and cloud strategies should be aligned with modernization efforts. Companies must first crawl to walk. Once the business and IT strategies are aligned, modernization plans can be developed. Before modernization, IT must identify potential problems across all areas and modernization patterns.
Converting business rules integrated into a system or application can become one of the biggest challenges. Adding outdated rules to a modern cloud environment creates redundancy. How can IT teams avoid this? How can these rules be extracted and centralized? Before a cloud modernization plan can be implemented, these questions and others should be addressed. Additionally, containerization of workflows and API integration of business capabilities should be checked off in the planning phases of cloud modernization.
Older systems typically rely on large, tightly integrated applications, making it challenging to change specific components. First, APIs should decouple these applications from the underlying infrastructure to facilitate modernization. As a result, atomizing these monolithic apps into business capabilities that are granular and cloud-based is more straightforward and less risky. The result is an environment where application requirements and market demands drive platform decisions, and change can be isolated.
Increasing efficiency and reducing costs
Data security and application availability are absolutely critical for running day-to-day operations. It is common for large, established organizations to retain some mainframe capabilities when adopting a cloud-first strategy. This makes sense since these existing capabilities support core business functions and profits.
A cloud environment best suited for executing processes and applications is crucial for scaling operations and achieving cost efficiencies. It is essential to determine whether to use public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure on-premises or off-premises. Using cloud-based data links, such as cloud brokers, can improve the efficiency of specific processes. A good example is processing transactions, such as validating financial records and Social Security numbers for loan applications. The privacy of PII data is paramount here, so a public cloud-based interface to fill out the application is necessary, as well as a mission-critical back end for the data.
Simplifying the cloud journey and measuring success
The risk and reward of each step in the modernization process should be measured to decide whether it is the right approach to take. How can change be beneficial versus the status quo? Which techniques and tools are needed to measure results? Decision-makers in the IT and business sectors should consider these questions.
What is the best way to choose a cloud modernization service?
Legacy contexts and business goals are unique to every organization. Thus, there is a wide range of different cloud modernization scenarios, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Taking into consideration your business’s pain points is the most crucial step in deciding whether to modernize. When putting together a modernization strategy, consider the age and maintainability of your legacy systems. Following that, you will need to decide which cloud platform is best suited to your needs and determine the appropriate architecture to be used in your cloud adoption plan.
Wrapping up
Modernizing enterprise IT through cloud-based solutions requires careful planning and collaboration. A meaningful digital transformation involves the integration of all facets of modernization. Adopting the cloud should be approached cautiously by enterprises. Although there are best practices, every organization’s cloud journey is unique, so organizations must adapt and learn along the way. The risk-reward assessment can help measure the success of cloud modernization – and prevent failures.
