Fast forward to Cloud in Digital transformation age — An Application Journey
Welcome to the “new normal” — perish or prevail is the new reality emerging from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With digital transformation in full force, many organizations, however, small or large — mapped and scaled their digital capabilities to the next level as a matter of survival. Cloud technology has become a key catalyst for the organization to be competitive and adaptable to changing market conditions and providing a secure digital experience to consumers. The technology landscape is in tectonic shift mode now, which brings innumerable cloud choices on the horizon but existing IT applications must achieve certain maturity to catch up with the technology shift and deliver on intended business benefits.
In the previous few years, the cloud has achieved mainstream technology status and a strategic shift towards a hybrid and multi-cloud to attain greater flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in is an emerging trend. However, few fundamental questions remain open for organizations who are in the digital journey to move their legacy application or bring out newer ones at an accelerated pace but due to the few key reasons, among many, a high number of existing applications with tight coupling, outdated architecture patterns, and legacy code makes it harder and rough ride. Few fundamental and proven strategies can be adopted for this transition to the Cloud world-
Take the first step
In the case of simple applications or non- business-critical applications with minimal or no dependencies can be migrated first using the lift and shift approach. Legacy databases or homegrown applications can also be the best candidate here. This very well gives tactical benefits to the organization with reduced operating costs, a transition from CapEx to OpEx model, and build the internal IT team capability with the cloud platform. However, this step may not provide full-scale benefits of resilience, elasticity, ease of deployment of the cloud. In a public cloud, Google cloud offers Compute, Storage, and database services where applications can be migrated with one to one mapping of underlying hardware and storage without changing a line of code. Similar to Google, Amazon and Microsoft also offer similar capabilities for this category of apps.
Break and design in a new way
The applications having tight coupling and major interdependencies can lead to re-platform and rearchitecting the applications. The fundamental model of application delivery can move from waterfall to DevOps culture at this stage in a seamless and frictionless manner. Proven successful ways are to break the application in individual services, API model and utilize the power of the cloud (Multi-cloud/hybrid) to pick and choose specific cloud resources depending upon the use case and cloud vendor recommendation. This could very well be played out to be a strategic shift for the organization to produce operational efficiency, scale, and business value.
Choose the best of the breed
Greenfield applications — Microservices, Kubernetes, Dockers, and the use of AI/machine learning are preferred techniques for this category of applications. This can turn out to be the pinnacle of the transformation journey if done right and result in the next available business need can be fulfilled in weeks if not in months and even build the foundation to pivot based on market demand and also unifying the teams across the organization in the whole process.
It is important to have a clear understanding of the organization’s maturity and culture to adapt to a cloud-first approach. With the emerging hybrid and public cloud strategy, compliance, monitoring, and security become a hard nut to crack in a complex IT environment. A detailed and thorough assessment is an absolute must of the whole IT application portfolio before embarking on this journey. The people, process, and technology pillars should grow in parallel to provide the right balance and holistic digital transformation, it is an iterative process than an overnight transition.
