Reflection of 2021 | Application Modernization Retrospective

I have been working with many clients in the application modernization space. After looking back over the key challenges of 2021 and the trend that will follow in 2022, I would like to share my quick perspective on this. I have noticed that there are some commonalities across business enterprise and industry. They are broadly:

Challenges to Integrate: ?

The traditional technology of legacy applications does not allow them to interact or integrate with new systems seamlessly. However, we can’t just throw or replace legacy application with new ones, the application still meets architectural needs it was originally designed for, but it prohibits to scale as the business portfolio grows and business model becomes more dynamic.

Looking Through Security Lens

We have been noticing application & platform security are becoming more & more important every day. Legacy applications?with vulnerabilities will not see the updates necessary to stay secure in the modern technology platform.?We need wider focused lens here because application needs to communicate with external downstream systems and it needs to work in hybrid ecosystem. Improper data & platform security presents a risk to every organization no matter the industry or scale. This would be business as usual as we build applications on cloud, we need to consider security right from the beginning. Our clients like to leverage app modernization as an opportunity to better their overall security posture. Moving from just few releases in a year to a weekly feature release, this cannot be manually done. Security needs be part of the Dev-Ops Pipeline and needs to be automated as much as possible. That’s why DevSecOps, AIOps & PrivacyOps would be a de-facto practice. PrivacyOps enesures global privacy standards into account such as but not limited to PIIA, LGPD, CCPA and GDPR, and then integrates them into the organization's automation procedures, infrastructure, best practices and orchestration systems.

Cost of Not Doing Anything

If a legacy application?operates exclusively on antiquated operating platform, the cost of using the application may eventually outweigh the cost of replacing both the software, hardware, and its associated platform in favor of a new application that can be hosted in the cloud. Building a new application on an older platform is a burning cost and it will have recursive effect in the application knowledge platform.

Data Modernization Realization

In legacy platform, data becomes stuck in individual silos leaving each business team isolated from the business insights that are created from having a fully integrated solution. This is perceived a biggest threat during COVID 19 pandemic where application business model needed to change drastically for several businesses and industries as their business process changed and business portfolio got diversified. As Modernization continues, DataOps (data operations) is an emerging discipline that brings together DevOps teams with data engineer and data scientist roles to provide the tools, processes and organizational structures to support the data-focused enterprise. You can refer to a great article on the same authored by Thor Olavsrud in CIO forum.

As we get into 2022, we will see the enterprises continue to embrace modern integration technology and evolve past outdated and manual or semi-automated business processing and right-shift towards IT process automation across the board.

We will also see higher and higher emphasis on Ecosystem Integration. Today, it’s an entirely new way of thinking for enterprises, regardless of the industry operation. An integration platform allows the enterprises to ditch its legacy platform and evolve via modern technology platform for better serving its clients and trading partners. Role of data modernization and security modernization will be more important now. The organizations recognize the importance of ecosystem integration technology and all the benefits that come with it, including on-boarding trading partners quickly. This would be one of the critical building blocks for legacy application modernization in 2022.

The emphasis of business process automation will continue whether it is order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, or their respective business processes, enterprises will maintain a high level of visibility. Having an end-to-end visibility provides a clear view of transactions between an organization's environment and those of its partners, suppliers, and customers. Application technology simplification, process simplification, embracing open architecture will continue to be key driver of technology transformation.

I have also learned that enterprises need flexibility. They must be able to adjust & accommodate on the fly and evolve to better serve their clients’ needs. From my delivery experience of working with many clients, I have noticed that automated IT processes show a clear path to success by eliminating those process bottlenecks i.e., time-consuming manual process. I wanted to highlight some key best practices as we navigate to next year:

• Build new or refine the processes that fit your organization’s current and desired future business patterns and culture
• Architect, design and orchestrate workflows that seamlessly integrates with applications and maximize resources (including human & capital)
• Create benchmarks for agility and the ability to integrate
• Adopt appropriate Code Pattern (for example: digital decoupling, Microservices with OpenShift Service Mesh, Microservice based industry platform pattern, data privacy & back-end integration etc.)
• Consult & collaborate with partners and thoroughly scope the extent of ecosystem integration and build an actionable modernization roadmap that includes ecosystem partners
• Anchor through various development process including testing cycles to ensure a successful modernization journey

Last but not least emotional resilience. I did mention application resiliency in few of my earlier posts, however emotional resilience is also equally important we also have gone through consecutive two years of pandemic, and we all have learned the ability to handle, overcome, and/or work through emotional adversity. Many of us have lost their loved ones during pandemic but we could navigate through the challenges. This helped us to become more matured, handling complex problems, whether it’s personal or professional. Wish you all a very Happy New Year 2022 !!

Note: All images are my own photographs and not copied from any other sources.