Organizations are transforming their businesses on the cloud journey to leverage advanced cloud computing capabilities and related technologies for a competitive edge. Cloud modernization emerges as a pivotal strategy for organizations to accelerate agility and innovation, unlock new business capabilities, enhance security and compliance, and reduce technical debt. In today’s fast-paced environment, to innovate quickly while managing the fluctuating economy and being careful with every dollar spent, organizations are implementing cloud modernization strategies. This blog will demystify the concept of cloud modernizations and elucidate its key benefits. The blog will also highlight the difference between cloud migration and cloud modernization.
What is cloud modernization?
Cloud modernization involves the process of transforming or reshaping the organization’s IT infrastructure or applications to unlock the full potential of cloud computing services and cloud-native technologies and architectures. The process includes moving legacy applications and data to the cloud and also restructuring legacy applications or workflows to make them more cloud-native. The process aims to improve efficiency, scalability, security, reliability and return on investment when transferring from on-premises infrastructure to cloud computing.
At its core, cloud modernization is a strategic and focused approach to modernizing an organization’s IT applications, infrastructure, and data centers using the efficiency of modern cloud-computing services and infrastructure. It helps organizations modernize mission-critical applications through different approaches such as rewriting, refactoring, or re-architecting to improve efficiency, security, and reliability
Cloud modernization: a necessity for enterprises
Cloud modernization is essential to address the limitations of traditional IT infrastructure and to respond to the needs and changing demands of customers and the market. It helps IT organizations to innovate with confidence while having a more agile and competitive future. Cost-efficiency is the most obvious reason for cloud modernization. Transforming an organization’s IT legacy infrastructure to the cloud reduces the expenses needed to invest in hardware and maintenance. Furthermore, reimagining and optimizing workflows, architectures, and applications in a cloud-native environment can help organizations meet business goals and maximize return on investment at the corporate and individual levels.
What distinguishes cloud modernization from cloud migration?
Cloud migration is simply about rehosting (Lift and Shift), which means relocating or transferring IT organizations’ legacy applications or workloads from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud with minimal changes to their architecture or functionality. This process aims to leverage cloud infrastructure benefits to gain scalability, flexibility and operational efficiency. Cloud migration is generally a faster and less complex process; however, it fails to fully exploit cloud-native features and architecture. Cloud migration is beneficial for small businesses where there are limitations on resources, budget or time. Additionally, it is also helpful when a quick transition to the cloud is required to reduce data center costs.
Cloud modernization, on the other hand, is more focused on transforming legacy or mission-critical applications to fully exploit cloud-native features, services, and technologies. In other words, it facilitates the deep transformation of applications, data and workloads to optimize efficiency, scalability, future proofing, and the customer experience. The process entails cloud-native paradigms such as microservices architectures, containerization (e.g., Docker), serverless computing, and DevOps and CI/CD to foster agility and innovation.
Cloud modernization is a resource-intensive and time consuming process; however, it ensures long-term efficiency and scalability by aligning applications with future-proof technologies. Additionally, cloud modernization has many benefits over cloud migration, such as smooth application running, reduced management overhead, maximum return on investment, high degree of availability, and advanced security.
Implementing modernization and migration together can do wonders!
The choice between cloud modernization and cloud migration depends on the organization’s specific needs, such as time and resources, cost, complexity, long-term goals, etc. Also, it is important to understand the business pain points when deciding between cloud modernization and cloud migration. On the other hand, implementing a hybrid approach is optimal. Modernization and migration can do wonders when implemented together. Both can help organizations enhance overall operations and deliver better-organized processes and workflows. For resource- and budget-constrained organizations, it is beneficial to start with cloud migration and then gradually modernize their applications to fully leverage cloud-native capabilities.
Some of the key benefits of cloud modernization are worth considering
Successfully implementing cloud modernization strategies can help organizations unlock unprecedented agility, efficiency, and innovation. Let’s unlock some of the key benefits of cloud modernization:
- Agility: By leveraging cloud native architecture, services, and functionalities such as microservices and CI/CD, cloud modernization offers unparalleled agility. It offers organizations a wide range of pre-built tools and services that enable faster development, testing, and deployment of applications. It also enables organizations to explore new business models and adapt to changing marketing dynamics and customer demand by providing access to advanced cloud services like AI, ML, and big data analytics.
- Cost-efficiency: Cost efficiency is one of the most obvious benefits of cloud modernization, as it does not require maintaining on-premises hardware and infrastructure. Moreover, with cloud modernization, organizations will only pay for the resources they use. This pay-as-you-go model helps prevent costly upfront investments and minimizes operational expenses.
- Advanced security: Cloud modernization helps increase the resilience of IT infrastructures by offering a wide range of security tools and services such as identity and access management, network security, intrusion detection, and automated updates. To mitigate security incidents and prevent, cloud modernization also offers better visibility into applications and data. Additionally, some cloud providers, like AWS (Amazon Web Services), offer multi-factor authentication to provide an extra level of security over the passwords and reduce the risk of a data breach.
- Enhanced operational efficiency and scalability: By leveraging technologies like microservices, containerization, and serverless computing, cloud modernization helps increase operational efficiency. Also, cloud modernization offers on-demand scalability to effectively handle varying workloads without overprovisioning resources or compromising performance. On-premises solutions are constrained by physical hardware, but cloud-based systems allow infrastructure to respond quickly to changes in resource requirements.
- Improved reliability: Cloud providers ensure high availability and data resilience through distributed systems that run across multiple data centers and geographic regions. This feature enables IT organizations to maintain uninterrupted operations without worrying about outages due to increased web traffic, hardware malfunction or any disaster event. Moreover, the continuous monitoring and management and robust recovery and backup solutions provided by cloud providers further enhance the reliability of IT systems.
- Greater accessibility: Due to the distributed infrastructure, cloud modernization enables universal access to applications, systems, and data, providing global reach and availability. It also provides anywhere, anytime access since cloud based applications and services are device agnostic, thereby fostering greater productivity and collaboration across geographically dispersed teams and diverse devices.
Conclusion
In essence, cloud modernization goes far beyond mere migration. It is about transforming and optimizing IT systems to fully exploit the comprehensive capabilities and benefits of cloud computing. It has become a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to achieve long-term business success in an increasingly digital and competitive landscape.
Cloud modernization certainly offers more benefits than cloud migration, but to actually gain access to these benefits, careful planning and implementation of the best cloud modernization strategies are a must. Before creating a modernization strategy, it is necessary to conduct a thorough assessment of infrastructure, applications, and processes. It is also advisable to consider the age and maintenance of legacy systems and determine which cloud platform will best meet the requirements. It is also necessary to use automation tools and implement best security practices to reduce the risk of human error and protect data from threats.
At Mearas Technologies, we deliver a 360-degree cloud enablement portfolio, including cloud consulting and strategy, architecture, application design and development, migration and security. Our data management capability includes data structure and engineering and data modernization. Contact us at adeasi@mearstec.com to learn more about our capabilities, and we will get back to you promptly.
FAQs on cloud modernization
Q1. What is cloud modernization and why is it important?
A1. Cloud modernization is all about updating or transforming legacy applications, data, and infrastructure to leverage cloud computing and cloud-native capabilities. Cloud modernization helps businesses achieve enhanced scalability and performance, security and cost-efficiency.
Q2. What challenges might organizations encounter during the implementation of cloud modernization?
A2. Apart from numerous benefits, cloud modernization comes with various challenges that organizations might face during implementation:
- High and unpredictable investment costs
- Incompatible legacy systems
- Ensuring data security and compliance during the transition
- Lack of stakeholder support
- Workflow disruption during transition
- The complexity of re-architecting applications
Q3. What are the cloud-native technologies used in cloud modernization?
A3. Below are some common cloud-native technologies used in cloud modernization:
- Microservices architecture
- Containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
- Serverless computing (e.g., AWS Lambda)
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI)