Enterprise IT has always faced the pressure of having to do more with a smaller budget and fewer resources. This trend continues in 2018. The only areas where there is room for the budget are in refreshing technology, getting rid of legacy systems, strategic outsourcing, and leveraging cloud infrastructure for application deployment. In this article, we will first break down the different layers of legacy system modernization within an enterprise. We will then look at how using a good platform coupled with strategic outsourcing services is the right approach for mitigating risks in modernization projects.
There are broadly three "layers" of legacy systems modernization within an enterprise. In this article, we focus deeply on the first two. The first layer consists of legacy applications that need to be refreshed or rebuilt on a new stack. This is where enterprise IT is spending the majority of its time: in moving legacy stacks and legacy architecture to an open standard, microservices-based architecture. This helps in the deployment of responsive (multi-channel) apps that are easier to maintain and adaptive to changing business needs.
The second layer that is getting modernized revolves around DevOps. Enterprises are looking for ways to go from slow manual release cycles with lots of "spaghetti" scripts to a rapid, error-free containerized delivery of applications. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, more than 50% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 20% today. The benefits of DevOps automation are faster go-live apps; no need for IT reskilling; and instant setup and launch across testing, staging, and production environments.
"Infrastructure" modernization is the third stage. This is about moving to compute and storage from existing corporate data centers to private and public clouds (or hybrid, multi-cloud). The shift to public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP are ongoing for several years now (84% of IT managers surveyed use public cloud infrastructure today). This trend should continue strong in the coming years.
For application and DevOps modernization, WaveMaker offers an integrated platform. With WaveMaker Rapid, you can visually build an application by dragging-and-dropping pre-built components. Alongside, you can fully leverage open-source standards in the generated code and integrate with enterprise assets like databases, security, and web services. With WaveMaker Hyscale, you can containerize your application (Docker under the hood), configure resources, continuously deploy to multiple environments, and finally measure and track all your application versions.
What is holding back enterprise IT today? Mainly, the risk of failure is associated with a major modernization effort. This arises mostly because of quickly changing well-established systems of records, business logic, and database that have been around for many years. A better approach to modernization involves careful consideration of existing systems and then re-using or refactoring many of their aspects in the modern system. You can take a "wrap-and-build" approach or a "refactor-and-rebuild" approach for modernization. Strategic outsourcing with WaveMaker Services can help you pick the right approach based on your business needs. This not only mitigates the risk of failure but also reduces any disruption to your existing business.
WaveMaker brings a powerful Platform + Services approach to modernization. Many enterprises' IT fails to tackle modernization with just a pure-play outsourcing approach. WaveMaker’s strategy for modernization fully leverages the platform for building business apps, integration with existing systems, componentized development, code-generation, API-creation, microservices, and container-based delivery. WaveMaker's strategic outsourcing services leverage this platform and offer customization and business logic changes. This Platform + Services approach by WaveMaker provides an agile approach to modernization with re-use, refactor, and rebuild strategies combined together.
