Enterprise Application Modernization: A Key to Organizational Agility
Enterprise Application Modernization
In an increasingly digital world and with the ongoing COVID pandemic, companies across all industries are striving for agility to sustain themselves. An agile business can keep up with fast-paced trends in technology, customer demands, and other unforeseen changes, Enterprise Application Modernization.
Being an agile enterprise requires tech teams to drive agility as a core design principle across applications, infrastructure, and operations- making digital transformation the need of the hour. But digital transformation is not an easy feat. It is a long-term journey that requires businesses to change their core business application services.
Enterprises run on an array of business applications services. For example, custom-coded applications on old mainframes, core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and other record systems like SAP, Oracle, and cloud-native applications.
As IT plays a critical role in digital transformation, enterprise application modernization is a great place to start as your business embarks on this journey. It is the process of aligning business legacy software to current enterprise needs, which can mean anything from refactoring, rearchitecting, or even replacing some enterprise application solutions.
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Examining your Existing Business Application Services Ecosystem
Business leaders need to understand that modernizing your business application services is not just about technical upgrades to maximize the benefits. It calls for the transformation of every component surrounding those applications – from processes and tooling to organizational structure.
If your organization is faced with the following difficulties –
- Technical debt accumulation
- Lessor, limited reach, scale, accessibility, and uptime
- Inefficiencies due to the sub-optimal architecture
- Big operational costs
- Tricky maintenance and addition of newer functionalities
- Hard to find skilled engineers to maintain the current system
It is highly recommended that you get started with enterprise application modernization as soon as possible.
When carried out successfully, it reduces the in-house server footprint for businesses and minimizes its costs. Most importantly, it increases agility and scalability for enterprises while enabling them to drive change proactively before they have to.
How Enterprise Applications Modernization Paves
Albeit the concerns businesses have regarding pivoting towards modernization journey, there are some compelling reasons which drive them towards enterprise application modernization. Soon, these benefits will drive more businesses to the cloud and assist them in delivering agility as a first principle.
Enhanced Security
Modernizing business application workloads with a hybrid cloud, enables companies to control the data storage environment and business processes. Hence, sensitive workloads can be maintained and managed in on-premise or private cloud environments. This gives agility to organizations by making it easier for them to comply with security requirements and changing policies.
Faster Speed to Market
Traditional business applications were built for stability instead of speed and agility. But the latter is needed to delight the modern customer. A key technical benefit of business application modernization is that it can quickly test and deploy new features. Having a hybrid cloud environment and decoupled applications gives businesses the flexibility to enable new changes than if they were tied only to one system. This is favorable because having a quick turnaround time and agility to address the changing market dynamics, gives an edge to businesses.
Increased Scalability
Sometimes it can be nearly impossible to gauge the workload demand for certain projects. At this juncture, the scalability derived from modernized business applications with a hybrid cloud makes it easier for business leaders to meet fluctuating demands.
When the workload does not have volatile demands, having a hybrid application approach allows businesses to strategically implement certain workloads on highly agile and elastic applications infrastructures to meet such demands.
Efficient Data Management
The cloud provides an easy backup for data centers and on-premiseenterprise application services. It is the most common technical benefit as the redundancy helps IT staff with peace of mind as the data is protected and updated, thus making businesses ready to respond quickly in any situation.
Improved Customer Experience
This is the top goal for digital transformation for many organizations. The combined benefits of better security, agility, scalability and data management enable organizations to provide better customer experiences. There are many instances where organizations can realize this –
- Scalable front-end systems enable better system performance to avoid service interruptions.
- Agility enables organizations to implement changes faster and respond quickly to customer needs.
- Improved security assures customers that their information is safe and protected.
To summarise, enterprise application modernization is a good starting point for organizations aiming to start their digital transformation journey, and achieve organizational agility. Businesses can realize total value from cloud migration and application modernization to enable better ROI and competency with cloud-native organizations.
