Cloud’s influence in App Modernization
In one of my earlier blogs, I talked about what Modern Apps are and how they impact Business in today’s corporate and consumer industries. While this heavily underlined and bolded NEED is forcing businesses to take a serious look into their App modernization requirements and strategies, and businesses are fast adopting to this inherent demand, I would like to accentuate the critical role that today’s Cloud infrastructure plays in this process.
As discussed in my earlier blog, modernization involves building/upgrading apps to include combinations of key factors such as platform and form factor agnostic/adapting applications with data exchange models, fostering social media, inheriting big data analytics and NUI concepts for deeper UX and customer retention, scalability, increased collaboration, etc. Building/Upgrading apps to meet these demands applies both to the B2B and B2C scenarios, and while I talked more about this from the end user – employee/consume perspective, in my earlier blog, I would like to talk a little bit about how this can be achieved in a scalable manner by the Business owners, while reducing the TCO and increasing the sustained ROI moving forward.
The strongest suggestion to achieve this is the Cloud! There are different levels of services provided on the cloud, such as IaaS (Infrastructure level), PaaS (Platform level), SaaS (Software/Application level). Leveraging these options to move your applications or your platform or your infrastructure itself to the cloud is quintessential not only in building a scalable infrastructure and application base, but also in reducing operations and maintenance demands, increased availability, pay-as-you-use paradigms, and resulting in increased TCOs through a multitude of other factors as well. Based on your sensitive business needs, Cloud technologies also provide flexibility in target environments such as Public, Private or Hybrid. This back end setup also helps in better integration and reachability to your target audience through continuous cross device and platform connectivity based on tools like Skydrive, etc. Adopting the cloud strategy in the backend for app modernization is virtually a no brainer in most of the cases to such highly visible benefits.
However, migrating applications to the cloud as part of the modernization strategy needs to be handled in a very careful and surgical manner to avoid risks and operational interruptions and ensure smooth transition. There are a multitude of factors that influence this migration roadmap – some of them are identified below:
- Clear definition of the critical success factors and criteria
- Defining the target environments and service levels for migration
- Identifying Business Process and App inventory and corresponding mapping
- App level delineation, inter app dependencies, consumption requirements
- SLAs and corresponding readiness testing
- Migration planning and execution etc…
While this process seems complicated and involved, this one time undertaking for migration is totally worth the effort, and for once Foresight IS 20/20!
Seeing how crucial a role the Cloud plays in App modernization, there are things that you could do to reduce these risks and make the migration process smoother. Services organizations who deal with such complications on a daily basis have in depth experience and expertise in such undertakings, with intrinsic knowledge of the risks involved, and can make this process be much less complicated. One of the most crucial aspects in such undertakings is following a methodical process that helps in the required analysis & identification, risk mitigation, to come up with the right migration execution strategy supplemented by the ability to actually execute the plan – Ensuring your resources/partners/vendors have these capabilities and has identified the required detailed process is pivotal to your success migration and modernization.
