Getting your organization to cloud is only the first part of the journey. Once there, you need to capitalize on the huge efficiency and innovation potential it offers. This means building applications and services specifically to maximize the value of a cloud environment.
For new greenfield developments this shouldn’t be a problem. But what about your legacy estate? If you’re a large organization, you’ll likely have hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of applications in your portfolio, many of which will be mission critical.
To capture long-term value, you’ll need to carefully decide which of these applications need to be modernized, and to what extent. You’ll also need to consider your infrastructure and data architecture choices, whether you’ve already “lifted and shifted” your applications or are just starting out on a cloud migration.
Modernize applications: Simply rehosting your applications in the cloud will likely cut some costs and solve some technical debt issues. But how much difference will your business users actually see and how much additional business value will it actually unleash? To truly maximize the value of the new environment, you must modernize your applications for the cloud.
Modernize infrastructure: As the world moves towards software-defined infrastructure, systems that can operate in the new “infrastructure as code” paradigm are becoming essential. Modernizing your infrastructure for this kind of environment—enabling much more automation and intelligence-driven management—can significantly optimize not only your costs, but also your business agility and flexibility.
Modernize data: Data is the third key pillar of a modernization strategy. In many enterprises today, legacy on-premises data architectures are complex, expensive, inflexible and hard to maintain. In contrast, modern data architectures in the cloud allow you to spin up advanced hyperscaler analytics services—including machine learning and deep learning—at a speed and with a level of simplicity that would be impossible in your own data center.