Are You Missing Out on Modernization Opportunities?
Enterprises embark on modernization journeys for many different reasons. Some are striving to increase speed to market and improve their ability to innovate. Others are seeking to boost TCO and reliability. And many are looking to leverage workload-specific tools to achieve maximum efficiency.
True modernization involves a lot more than just migrating applications to the cloud. Read on to learn about some common modernization misconceptions and how to go about cloud-native transformation.
You’re in the cloud, so you’ve already modernized… right?
Not exactly, but it’s a good start. If your organization used a lift and shift strategy to migrate to the cloud, you’re in the majority. While this is a great first step towards modernization, it’s certainly not the last one.
As Jonny James, Sunstone™ Product Manager at Cloudreach, explains in his blog, transformation really begins once workloads have migrated and data center exits have been completed. Since most cloud migrations employ a re-host (lift & shift) migration pattern, applications aren’t re-architected for the cloud. This model is also referred to as “Move, then Improve”.
Realizing the true promise of the cloud requires continual modernization – and that calls for a rapid, targeted, iterative approach.
Your apps are scalable in a cost-effective way… right?
Now that your legacy apps are running in the cloud, you’d think it would be easy to scale them in alignment with users – and benefit from reduced costs. However, in order to scale or update even a single component of a monolithic application, the entire app must be scaled or updated, requiring reconfiguration of the whole stack.
That’s why modernizing an application to a microservices architecture makes so much sense. By deconstructing an app into a collection of microservices, these modular components can be scaled and deployed independently, thus reducing costs. This is where cloud-native technologies such as containerization can come into play.
You know exactly where to start your modernization journey…right?
Identifying modernization targets is a daunting task that places significant demands on in-house resources to map out application dependencies and undergo lengthy planning cycles. Then, once targets have been identified, they need to be prioritized in terms of complexity and the potential cost savings, productivity, customer value and so on.
In a recent webinar, Thomas Maine, Cloud Architect at Cloudreach, explained that in order to optimize a modernization effort, it’s important to start with the easy things and initially avoid the edge cases. “What we have found is that by starting with simple cases first, we learn how to walk before we run. And some of the small workloads end up being the biggest benefactors of modernization,” he stated.
Sunstone ™, Cloudreach’s in-cloud application modernization software platform, provides dynamic, real-time visibility into your cloud estate for intelligent modernization recommendations. It helps to demystify modernization in a fast and cost-effective way:
- 71% less time required for estate discovery, leading to less demand on in-house resources & faster time to future state planning
- 16% average license reduction saving
- 42% increase in development team productivity following implementation of IaaS-PaaS modernization recommendations
The path from Cloud 1.0 to modernization is clear
Sunstone™’s automated resource discovery and application dependency mapping services map out your cloud footprint, while analytics engines continuously evaluate your infrastructure for modernization targets… helping you rapidly realize the potential of the cloud.
Learn more about Sunstone™.
