As more and more enterprises experience the benefits of cloud solutions, digital transformation is being pursued as a key strategy for achieving business objectives. What is often lacking with these strategies is a broad approach that not only identifies the specific applications that improve customer experiences, but also takes into account the infrastructure and systems that are necessary for a true transformation. That’s where cloud modernization comes in.
Digital transformation creates a better customer experience, improves flexibility and agility, and provides relief to operating costs. What stands in the way are the infrastructure and applications that don’t allow the enterprise to take full advantage of cloud benefits. Digital technologies like automation, connected devices, and artificial intelligence all come into play when cloud modernization is embraced by the organization. It marries technological investments with people and processes for a comprehensive, coordinated approach.
A Coordinated Strategy
Enterprises often embark on digital transformation, only to get stalled out or fail to realize the expected benefits. They may have failed in their efforts because they approached it in a disconnected, piecemeal way. A modernization strategy aligns technology with enterprise business strategies. Once this alignment is in place, it’s possible for IT to create a cloud modernization plan, identifying potential problems across all aspects of the plan.
Before putting a modernization plan in place, teams need to determine how to use existing business rules that can be converted to new systems and applications, without redundancy. They also need to examine how workflow containerization will be handled, as well as how a path for enabling application programming interfaces (APIs) will be used. These processes can be costly when a legacy system is built on a highly-integrated set of applications. Using APIs, IT teams can separate the apps from the infrastructure to lower the risk involved with modernization.
Creating New Efficiencies
Many enterprises find that a hybrid solution best fits their needs and budget for digital transformation. Maintaining some mainframe capabilities helps ensure that core business functions are protected. As the company looks for cost savings, they will need to examine where to place each process, application, and workload to derive the most cost efficiency from a cloud modernization strategy.
IT teams can also measure the potential risk and reward of the placement of each process, determining which will help them enable the features that best allow them to pull ahead of the competition and offer superior experiences to customers.
Each cloud modernization journey is unique, and enterprises need to examine how to achieve scalability, flexibility, agility, and cost savings within a comprehensive plan. Those that fail to embrace these broader plans and instead opt for a less-coordinated approach can expect to enjoy fewer benefits from their cloud investments.Before embarking on your move to cloud modernization, contact us at AMD Technology. We can help you map out your path to a new technology environment that makes the most of your investment.