Many organizations today are struggling to get the full value of migrating their enterprise systems to the cloud. The reason, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Company, is that companies tend to “fall into the trap of confusing simply moving IT systems to the cloud with the transformational strategy needed to get the full value of the cloud.” In essence, organizations are simply outsourcing their data centers, which prevents them from maximizing the benefits of the cloud.
That’s where the concept of modernization comes in. Moving to the cloud is only one—albeit essential—component of modernizing your infrastructure, applications, and approach to software development.
Why move to the cloud in the first place?
Among the top reasons are increased business agility and speed—and the competitive advantage that offers. Another compelling driver for many companies is the increased productivity of their workforce, while a number of organizations shift to the cloud to innovate and transform their business with modern technologies, reimagining their applications within a modern framework.
That’s why simply getting to the cloud should never be thought of as the finish line for your modernization efforts. Creating a new application in Amazon Web Services (AWS) or “lifting and shifting” legacy applications to AWS doesn’t automatically result in applications that can take full advantage of the elasticity, resiliency, ease of deployment and management, and flexibility that AWS offers. Nor does it automatically modernize your culture and processes to enable high-performing software development.
Modernization means taking your application environment in the form that it is today (most likely legacy and monolithic) and transforming it into something that is more agile, elastic, and highly available. In doing so, you can transform your business into a modern enterprise. However, modernization is not easy or trivial, nor does it happen overnight.
This ebook introduces a pragmatic and continuous approach to application modernization as part of a greater modernization effort on the AWS platform. You’ll learn about the choices, trade-offs, and benefits of various approaches to continuously modernizing your applications, and how you can achieve your goals for transformative IT and business outcomes.