Application Modernization: A Foundation To Speed Up Your Business
Digital transformation and app modernization involves the use of new and advanced technologies. It may encompass updating systems, platforms and software to meet today's modern needs.
Today, many companies are defined by the digital services they provide. It can be as simple as taking existing paper processes and making them electronic using new software and hardware, or more complex, phasing out existing infrastructure and equipment and switching to the cloud. Applications are not just the backbone of digital transformation – they are the heart of modern business and APIs are the currency of the digital economy.
As a result, companies are exploring new ways to optimize their application modernization efforts for speed, quality and security as they move towards becoming a digital-first enterprise. The conversation turned to business-centric results, using the product team's approach to their modernization efforts—delivering a modern experience for developers experience and allowing the freedom to innovate using the best services from different cloud providers without getting stuck.
When it comes to delivering digital experiences first, it's important to foster an internal culture of embracing change, targeting iterative value delivery and pursuing continuous product improvement. accurate, accurate. Modernization requires more than just the adoption of new technologies - it requires cultural transformation.
Adopt modern software development techniques
At first glance, the path to modernization seems simple: quickly move existing workloads to the cloud and refactor applications, using new frameworks and methodologies while leveraging a rich palette of cloud services. This is the process of taking an existing workload, making the necessary changes, and deploying it to the cloud. In fact, that's easier said than done for most companies whose businesses aren't traditionally focused on building custom software.
This is true for companies in almost every industry, including healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance, and more. Cloud platforms often offer excellent value for money, modern provisioning of resources, and flexibility with business needs. Additionally, these organizations focus on implementing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions to automate their operations and rely heavily on third-party service companies for the integration and customization of this software. Most organizations lack the in-house talent and modern software engineering experience to use cloud services wisely, ensuring that the services they provide are secure, compatible, and scalable. Deliver new features at the speed you need to stay competitive.
The learning curve is difficult to build and manage modern applications on an infrastructure. It is further complicated by companies that maintain legacy applications with decades of software methodologies still in use.
Developers don't want to think about the underlying infrastructure on which their software runs. Instead, they want to focus on writing valuable code and deploying it to production faster, without operational bottlenecks. At the same time, operators are looking for consistent visibility across each cloud, which can be tricky when organizations run workloads across multiple clouds. A great developer experience means teams can add value to the business by spending less time on internal processes and more time building something meaningful for their customers.
Developers often spend a lot of time determining how to build and run new applications. ActiveState released its 2019 developer survey, and while it contains some interesting findings, one element that stood out was this: Developers don't have the time to create as much code as they need to.
The survey found that 61.5% of developers spend four hours or less a day coding, with the majority spending just two to four hours a day doing so. That 61.5% number is a 10% increase from the 2018 results, where 51% said they receive four hours or less of coding per day.
Ultimately, the ability to efficiently build and manage modern applications on any hybrid or native cloud is critical for customers to build and leverage competitive advantage across industries.
Taking a Product and Platform Approach: Adopting a '’Shift Left'’ Mindset
Modern applications - and the software development processes that support them - require a modern approach to product development and management at the core. As organizations accelerate their digital journey, rapid delivery capabilities are essential for application teams and hence the need to deploy DevSecOps at scale. Organizations need a consistent DevSecOps platform to drive a safe and fast path from code to production, ensuring application performance, cost optimization and availability for applications that are now spread across public clouds, local clouds, and multiple public clouds. Modern product delivery teams need an application-centric platform to stay focused on the customer, not the infrastructure.
Modern cross-platform teams can provide a unified developer experience and a fully managed production pipeline. The platform team enables natural collaboration between developers, architects, security operations and infrastructure. More advanced platform teams are moving to intent-based systems where developers can define intent (cost, performance, security, compliance) and the application platform manages the rest. Together, a unified developer experience powered by a fully managed path to production and powered by intent-based automation enables the creation of radical products and customer-centric lines of culture.
Choosing to be a software development company also facilitates a developer-first culture that pays long-term dividends. Organisations with modern application development workflows receive higher quality code for faster production. Instead, they are more agile in responding to growing customer expectations and requirements and are positioned to compete in a crowded market. Any company can be great software with a lot of commitment and willingness to change, but building trust requires a proven framework that is fast enough to evolve as needed.
When it comes to application modernization, developers must have the right support and resources to build the best applications that drive business results. Organizations that empower their teams with superior developer experience and take a cross-platform approach will be rewarded with improved software resilience and responsiveness to market dynamics and customer demands. Ongoing investment in developer experience and application platforms to support secure software distribution is no longer a nice to have — it's an absolute necessity.
