Ghufran Shah , Metsi Technologies Global CIO, highlights Metsi’s unique approach in guiding customers to lasting application modernisation, in a time when it is essential to business success.
Applications are central to your business and, in the rapidly-evolving modern tech space, are becoming more complex than ever. The efficiency of core business functions and an organisation’s ability to rapidly expand capability are dependent on reliable, secure and scalable applications.
Legacy applications are characterised by long release cycles, costly maintenance and dependence on often outdated and inefficient infrastructure and services. In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, the way these obstacles are navigated can mean the difference between business success or failure. The challenge of legacy application modernisation is thus one of critical importance to the success of the modern enterprise.
An effective legacy application modernisation strategy drastically reduces development time while laying the foundation for easier scaling and deployment.
Common Approaches to Application Modernisation
The challenge of modernising your platform infrastructure, architecture, and capability of legacy systems needs a well-defined assessment, strategy selection, and execution approach. To achieve reliability, availability and predictable performance you need a modern, scalable, end-to-end infrastructure that is self-monitoring, self-analysing, and self-optimising. Moving apps from monolithic to microservices architecture to power applications of immense size and scale is a considerable undertaking requiring proven methodology.
There are several standard approaches to moving business-critical applications to the cloud, ranging from a simple “lift and shift” approach which moves an existing application to a more suitable environment, to a complete re-architecture of legacy applications. Though different in implementation, these approaches generally follow the same basic logic.
First, a detailed assessment is made of existing applications to identify gaps and vestigial functionality. Then, based on the initial assessment a suitable remedy is prescribed. Lastly, in the implementation phase, the legacy system is transitioned over to the new system and goes live.
Metsi’s Unique Approach
Metsi’s unique approach is an informed interpretation of Gartner’s 7 options to modernise legacy systems. This approach is robust and suitable to even the most challenging modernisation requirements.
Metsi’s application modernisation roadmap
First, during the discovery and assessment phase, our strategic advisory gauges existing IT infrastructure through assessments and interviews and ensures IT transformation is aligned to tangible business goals. This process entails mapping functionality and application layers, inspecting the application structure for obsolete functionality while identifying gaps, and then modelling the resulting container stack. By knowing the “As Is” we plan the path to the “To Be”.
Based on the assessment of your information landscape, there are 7 potential paths you can take towards achieving application modernisation; namely re-host, re-platform, re-purchase, re-factor, retain, retire and encapsulate. These paths are by no means restrictive, and certain situations may require a combination of paths or iteration between paths across implementation cycles. The application modernisation diagram maps out the interplay between these paths, showing the agile approach taken to reach success.
The last phase is validation and go-live. This phase ensures that the desired outcomes have been met by the successful execution of the chosen pathway. The selected solutions are checked to make sure they perform consistently across a multitude of devices and environments. The alignment of IT and business goals are verified and go-live ensures “lights are turned on” in a way that ensures service continuity with no unplanned end-user impact.
This application modernisation approach has served our customers well and ensured lasting success for their information systems, in aid of larger business objectives. Metsi stays abreast of the latest technologies and platforms to guide clients on their journey to digital maturity. With immersive web experiences gaining wider adoption, we have created a unique 3D web journey showcasing in detail the different possible paths to application modernisation in, a world-first representation of the 7Rs approach.
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