A Place Between 0 & 1

This is a next blog in the Application Modernization series. You can check the last blog about how culture is important for Application Modernization journey.

Infrastructure Modernization is not a destination, but a journey often painted in shades of gray instead of black or white

Modernizing your infrastructure is an important lever in the overall application modernization journey of any enterprise, and often, this is the first step to ensure efficiency and scalability of any application. Infrastructure is defined by storage servers, network device, operating systems and middleware with a view to help enterprises secure, curate and use their data and content. As applications grow with more features added due to changing user expectations, infrastructure will get difficult, cumbersome and expensive to manage. At this stage, teams look at modernizing their infrastructure by implementing containerization and moving applications to a cloud environment. 

With increasing data security breaches, more access to data usage through smart phone penetration, and increasing amount of data to be stored, used and accessed, legacy infrastructure systems will not suffice. But as enterprises move to the cloud, what happens to the expensive hardware investments they have made in the past? Strategically speaking, infrastructure modernization needs to be able to choose the applications within a larger framework that need to be modernized, while others can rest on existing, already-invested hardware. Choosing which to modernize and which to tolerate in a hardware environment is the most integral part of getting the right modernization strategy in place. 

It is not about whether your infrastructure is fully modernized or not, but more about the right-fit hybrid between legacy and modern infrastructure environments. For every application, the right questions need to be asked to judge the right approach, and this effort will help yield the best ROI on your modernization time and money expended. 

The first step is to question the need of each application, and if it is no longer needed, the application needs to be moved to end of life. Based on whether each application has been commoditized, strategic or ROI driven will help to define whether your approach should explore software, platform or infrastructure as a service, respectfully. In addition, there may be applications, which are non-compliant to cloud environments, and in these cases, you will need to keep them in existing legacy hardware and ‘tolerate’ their existence. It is not about ideal, but efficiency in choosing a realistic, ROI based approach to infrastructure modernization. 

This journey is not an easy one, but an important one to ensure products deliver the best experience to the end user. Apart from optimizing cost, infrastructure modernization can help you to better utilize human effort, which would otherwise be spent on upgrading and maintaining infra, move into an agile method of delivering products, and improve data security & trust through cloud infra environments. At the end, this leads to accelerated revenue and optimized spends for any business, but if teams want the most efficient method, it is time they look for a shade of gray best suited for their requirements, rather than spending time chasing an ideal!