CIO’s Guide To Application Modernization
Organizations are under immense pressure to become agile and innovative. Customers are changing. Competition is emerging faster & from unexpected places. Get ahead of the curve.
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About This Whitepaper
In the last five years, businesses around the world have been going through immense pressure by market conditions and competitors. On top of that, the global pandemic, in many ways, catalyzed existing business problems to completely new heights. The burden of a lot of these new challenges fell on the shoulders of the CIO who are now tasked to solve a series of business problems and do so, very urgently.
Some of these challenges include:
- increase visibility across both internal operations and over volatile market conditions
- reduce costs in a period where cash inflow is limited
- Increase productivity (especially under new working conditions) while preserving capital and without disruption
Thankfully, CIOs’ lives can be made easier with a step-by-step deployment of cloud computing technology - particularly, the deployment of application modernization technologies and practices.
This whitepaper guides readers through a series of tried-and-test steps, best practices, and approaches related to application modernization that can be especially helpful to CIOs who want to learn:
- How to identify bottlenecks and create an action-oriented roadmap to prepare the company’s IT operations for the future
- How to preserve capital by reusing existing services
- How to develop your cloud architecture and modernization roadmap
- How to establish a success-oriented modernization process
- How to leverage Google Cloud Platform and its technology partners for quick results
Key Takeaways:
- The first step to any form of cloud migration should be to assess the company’s portfolio of core applications.
- Following a decoupled operating model that focuses on common objectives is essential - businesses can do this in a number of ways.
- In order to make the most out of cloud computing, different technologies must be used together to make overall operations cheaper, more flexible, and faster.
- Ideally, modernization shouldn’t be a solo exercise. Instead, working with a certified Google Cloud team can significantly improve time-to-market and resilience while reducing failures and ambiguity in operations.
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Beginning With Decoupling Applications
Some of the biggest challenges to application modernization and cloud migration in general, stem from legacy IT systems that inhibit change. These systems contain the company’s portfolio of core applications in a closely coupled architecture - also known as the monolith. The monolith becomes increasingly convoluted as the company expands until either the backend can no longer keep up with the frontend (something similar happened to Uber in its early stages) or each update introduces system-wide failures.
There are other signs of a monolith application reaching its end-life - explained here.Once it’s clear that a monolith architecture is no longer a viable business solution, CIOs must create a roadmap of decomposing the monolith. One of the most common and safest methods of breaking the monolith is through functional decomposition, where engineers use refactoring and rearchitecting the monolith into services that each have a specific function. Functional decomposition significantly improves visibility and allows developers to work on different functions of the application with different priorities.
Reach Your Application Full Potential
After functional decomposition, your developers will have a clearer view of individual components and dependencies which can then be partitioned, scaled, and eliminated based on the company’s future needs. At the same time, certain aspects of the application will need to be reinforced to meet today’s demands, things such as disaster recovery and data protection.
That said, functional decomposition is just the first step of application modernization. Our main goal here is to make the application suitable for a cloud environment and breaking down the monolith did a lot of the work while also simplifying the application.
Next, the CIO needs to plan and improve other areas of the applications including business continuity, automation, security, and scalability. There are different ways to do this. For instance, you may choose to integrate new technologies into existing services or simply build new processes if you didn’t already have the required capabilities.
Choosing The Right Approaches
Like its end product, the process of application modernization is far from strict. Developers and engineers have the option to choose from a range of approaches, models, and methodologies - ensuring that the entire modernization process stays as close as possible to three easily measured goals: speed, stability, and reliability.
Additionally, the whitepaper explains popular modernization approaches such as the Product over Projects delivery model and even some of Google’s own best practices developed internally to produce greater short-and-medium term gains such as the “J-Curve of Transformation”.
Choosing The Right Partner
“It’s easier said than done” is an adage that we hear all too often and in some cases, it is true. It is certainly easier to choose methodologies and create a roadmap than it is to follow through with it. New challenges arise and unexpected problems will come up from time to time, all of which have the potential to slow progress down while increasing costs.
The solution? Don’t go on a solo journey. Working with Google’s trusted partners such as D3V Technology ensures you have access to your own dedicated Google Cloud team consisting of certified cloud developers that can quickly come up with custom solutions for the unique challenges that your business might face.
