How IT leaders can fast-track application modernization solutions

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By JJ Asghar, Developer Advocate at IBM

Change and innovation are often cited as the twin engines for powering business growth and success. This holds especially true in relation to modernizing core business applications. But many enterprise-level organizations in global industries like banking, insurance, and telecommunications continue to face roadblocks involving complexity and cost.

For starters, traditional systems designed for on-premises use may not integrate easily with modern software applications. This has many large enterprises dealing with the technical debt of disparate patches and upgrades, and software is often left siloed — resulting in limited visibility and potentially reduced quality. And then there's the complexity of implementing new systems and processes, which can disrupt business and slow down overall operations without the proper strategy.

We have seen that these and other issues have IT and other business technology leaders scrambling for ways to modernize their application portfolios to increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness and provide more engaging experiences for internal stakeholders and customers. In fact, according to a 2022 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by IBM, 45% of surveyed IT decision-makers said their organization is adopting either modernization in place or a hybrid modernization approach.

The journey to application modernization

Application modernization refers to updating outdated business systems and applications. The primary challenge lies with taking monolithic, on-premises applications and modernizing their platform infrastructure, internal architecture, or features. To embark on an app modernization journey, IT leaders need architectural flexibility coupled with leading technologies like AI, containers, and automation. These resources can be found within a robust hybrid cloud strategy that will help optimize business needs.

That said, each organization's application modernization journey looks different.

For some companies, it's about application architecture. This may involve integrating systems with application programming interfaces or doing a full lift-and-shift of infrastructure and software. For others, it's about improving data accessibility and implementing AI throughout the business lifecycle. For many, it's a combination of services that requires a strategic approach involving moving existing legacy workloads onto a modern cloud platform and breaking monolithic applications into microservices.

The recently released IBM Application Modernization Field Guide can help by offering IT leaders a customizable roadmap for updating an existing business framework with more modern and agile solutions that are scalable, highly available, and secure.

Build once and deploy across clouds

• Assess your applications: Identify applications that can be readily moved into the cloud platform and those that will require refactoring.
• Build applications quickly: Create containerized workloads through the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform to serve as the foundation for applications and services thanks to their scalability, openness, and portability.
• Automate deployments for productivity: Use DevOps pipelines to automate deployments quickly and reliably.
• Run and manage consistently: Consolidate operations for applications into a common management approach to ensure reliability.

Choose the approach that best meets your needs

• Containerize monolithic applications: Define business opportunities and drive new insight into existing ideas. Define the opportunity, prototype with your developers, and co-create a solution.
• Expose on-premises assets: Utilize APIs to enable existing assets that would otherwise be difficult to move to the cloud.
• Refactor into microservices: Restructure workloads into smaller, deployable components based on maturity, modernization objectives, and requirements, then sunset monolithic applications.
• Add new microservices: Innovate incrementally, reduce complexity, gain deeper visibility, and establish success early. Incrementally sunset the monolith.

In today's fast-changing digital climate, the need to adapt to a market's needs while complying with the increasing security regulations has become crucial for any business. 

Find out how you can unlock more business value with the help of IBM's application modernization services.

This post was created by IBM with Insider Studios.