Our client sought to modernize a strategic on-premises platform that houses a large number of business critical process automation applications.
The benefits that cloud offers over on-premises computing are well known – flexibility, high resiliency/availability and lower cost. Large organizations are increasingly modernizing their platforms in order to capitalize on these benefits, and that means rethinking our approach to application development, as well – concepts such as agile development, DevOps, software currency and full-stack Data Security have come to the forefront as executives strive to keep pace with ever-changing trends in business and technology. Building and securing a cloud platform is the first order of business, and that requires expertise in cloud architecture and development, operations automation and multi-tiered data protection.
One bit of advice – don’t wait to start preparing for operational readiness and security approvals, as these efforts will challenge even the best program managers, especially if it’s the first time your organization is moving customer data to the public cloud.
Next up is the task of migrating your applications to the cloud, and this is where the benefits realization begins – ramping up the cloud and turning off on-premises environments opens the door to auto-scaling (only pay for resources when they are needed, then simply turn them off) and auto-healing which helps in the drive to zero down-time. Most organizations have a significant number of related applications that have grown organically over several years, so a development partner with prior cloud migration experience can help to establish a factory model based on a repeatable pattern and supporting tools to guide application development teams through the migration process.
Before migrating to the cloud, each application should undergo a rationalization exercise to determine if it is eligible for migration, whether it can be partially/fully merged with another application, or even if it should be decommissioned. Rationalizing your application space can deliver huge savings in operations and maintenance, as well as revealing opportunities to extract reusable components and further accelerate future application development efforts.
In summary, a clearly defined technology strategy and disciplined approach to maintaining the currency of your environments, development tools and methodologies are the keys to “future-proofing” your organization in support of your business objectives.
