With 95% of customers surveyed earlier this year listing modernizing applications as a top priority*, many customers are left asking how to get started. Having a clear application strategy when it comes to multi-cloud is critical for success, and the strategy needs to align with both technical and business priorities. Each application is different and won’t all fit into a single “modernized” bucket. In this article, we’ll cover some of the basics needed to get started, including the five R’s and resources that are available to assist.
Before each application is assessed for the right modernization strategy, it’s important for organizations to understand the business need for modernization. What business outcome is expected through modernization, and how does that relate to the work needed to achieve that outcome? What applications are preventing or constraining these business outcomes? What outcomes are most critical for the organization’s success? These answers can help create a prioritized list of applications to focus on.
Organizations can then utilize the prioritized list to assess each application. In this phase, it’s important to understand the business value and technical complexity of the application. The previous exercise of prioritizing the applications should be helpful for the business value portion, but the organization would also want to factor in the cost of running the application versus its usefulness. From a technical perspective, understanding the technical debt and having someone in your organization that understands the application is key to successfully modernizing the application.
As you are assessing an application, it should fit into one of the five ‘R’ buckets:
- Refactor is basically rewriting an application, breaking it apart into microservices and APIs. This can be very complex and time-consuming but can provide significant benefits for applications that are high on the priority list and those that require frequent updates.
- Replatform involves ‘containerizing’ an application and moving it to a Kubernetes platform. This is a common strategy used to migrate VM-based workloads to containers and run them in the public cloud.
- Rehost sometimes referred to as “lift and shift”, involves changing the underlying infrastructure the application is running on without changing the application code itself. Some organizations will use this approach to quickly bring applications to the cloud after an M&A event or the need to evacuate a data center quickly.
- Retain essentially means leaving the application as-is. This may not always be the best long-term technical or business decision but can be employed when in situations where the data and/or application cannot be moved into the cloud, possibly due to compliance or technical factors.
- Retire is used for applications that may no longer be used or can be replaced with off-the-shelf or a SaaS equivalent.
For some organizations, this can be a daunting process and become somewhat overwhelming. The good news is there is help! VMware Tanzu Labs partners with organizations worldwide to accelerate the delivery of software and modernize legacy applications while reducing operating costs and risks. Tanzu Labs can help develop a modernization strategy for your applications and shorten time to value.
For more details on VMware Tanzu Labs and their App Navigator consulting engagement, please visit this site (https://tanzu.vmware.com/app-navigator).
Developing a strategy for your applications is key as you embark on your digital transformation journey to multi-cloud. It’s critical that the strategy aligns with your desired business outcomes to ensure success. For those organizations that are struggling to develop an application strategy, there are services and resources available to assist and guide you down the path to success.
Once the application strategy has been deployed, there needs to be a unified way to manage them, regardless of where the application is running. This will be the next topic we cover, developing an operations and management strategy.
*VMware FY24 Enterprise Operational Excellence Study, March 2023
