Quick Guide: App Migration and Modernization with AWS Cloud Infrastructure

As businesses embrace digital transformation, application leaders are looking for effective ways to modernize legacy systems to leverage accelerate growth, improve efficiencies, customer delight, and competitive advantage. However, often businesses tend to start with the oldest systems but according to a Gartner recommendation, modernization of complex, aging applications tends to should focus on valuable capabilities and understanding the risk-to-reward ratio.

Modernizing efforts should focus on the entire product life cycle, following a focused and deep evaluation of your application estate, and budgeting and planning the modernization work with provision for continuous modernization.

The Three-Step Process to App Modernization

According to Gartner, app modernization should be undertaken following a three-step evaluation process to determine the best approach, which is determined by the problem that needs to be solved.

• Step #1 involves evaluating the legacy systems using six drivers that include the limitations created by the legacy application due to its functionality, technology, or architecture. This could be from a business perspective or the technology perspective.
• Step #2 is to evaluate modernization options once the gaps have been identified and includes:

1. Encapsulating the application’s data and functions by leverage and extending its features to make them available as services via an API.
2. Rehosting the application component to other infrastructure (physical, virtual, or cloud) with its code, features, or functions as is.
3. Migrating the app to a new runtime platform with minimal changes to the code, and no changes to functions, code structure, or features.
4. Refactoring, restructuring, and optimizing the existing code to improve its nonfunctional attributes and remove technical debt.
5. Rearchitecting the code to migrate it to new application architecture to leverage better capabilities.
6. Rebuilding the application component by redesigning or rewriting it from scratch as per the existing scope and specifications.
7. Replacing the old application component completely to develop a new one based on new requirements and needs.

• Step #3 is to choose the most effective modernization approach by mapping it to the seven options and analyzing their impact on technology, architecture, functionality, cost, and risk.

Migration and Modernization with AWS

One of the leading cloud migration service provider, AWS or Amazon Web Services, allows you to plan the migration of your applications based on your business objectives and at your own pace instead of agreements or licensing. For instance, it allows lifting and shifting of applications, refactoring, or fully re-platforming them, based on your risk-to-reward ratio and value-based prioritization of the applications you want to modernize.

AWS enables businesses to reduce payback periods to 6 months and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 64%. The flexibility and ease of use along with AWS’s deep service offerings have pushed it ahead of the competition — to become the leader in the cloud infrastructure market and garner 32 percent in the first quarter of 2021, with revenues of around $39 billion. AWS helps businesses meet their goals of lowering costs, increasing efficiencies, and protecting existing investments.

In most organizations, migration and modernization will need rearchitecting, rebuilding, or replacing.

With AWS, migration, and modernization is a three-phase migration process that can accelerate the migration of several applications quickly and efficiently using an iterative process to make the processes repeatable and predictable. Apart from AWS’s migration tools, it also offers a third-party migration tooling ecosystem for automation and intelligent recommendations leveraging machine learning.

The three-phase process aligns with the Gartner recommended three steps and provides the necessary tools to implement them. Tools such as Migration Evaluator, Migration Hub, Cloud Economics Center, and Prescriptive Guidance:

• To assess tour current preparedness to migrate to the cloud
• Identify the objectives to develop the business case
• Evaluate the on-premises resources to create a right-sized and optimized cost projection for running them in AWS
• Estimate the TCO projection for AWS based on the actual utilization of resources
• Optimize compute, storage, database, networking, and software licenses on AWS

Benefits of AWS

By migrating and modernizing applications with AWS, you can benefit from:

• Ease of Use: Application providers, ISVs, and vendors can host existing applications or new SaaS-based applications quickly and securely. The AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs facilitates easy access to AWS’ application hosting platform.
• Flexibility: AWS allows you to choose the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services of your choice. You can install software and services as needed by your application on the virtual environment provided to you. Hereby, you can use existing applications as also build new solutions.
• Cost-Effectiveness: The pay-per-use model enables you to keep your costs low and pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources that you use.
• Reliability: AWSruns on a reliable global computing infrastructure that powers Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar marketplace.
• Scalability: AWS provides Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing to allow your application to scale up and down to suit the demand along with sufficient compute and storage resources.
• Security: AWS ensures a secure environment at the physical, operational, and software levels using an end-to-end approach to protect and harden the infrastructure.

From Roadmap to Implementation — Indium

Evaluating the existing applications, prioritizing those that need to be migrated to the cloud, whether they need restructuring, rehosting, or replacing can be a difficult call to make unless there is in-house expertise available. It can also be an overwhelming task for the IT team which also has to manage the infrastructure for smooth functioning. This can lead to delays in opting for the best approach to modernize, losing precious time. Any mistakes can also prove costly for the organization.

Indium, a more than two-decade-old software development company, is an AWS partner and can help businesses with their app migration and modernization. Our team of technical experts, supported by cross-domain expertise, can assess, devise and implement the best-fit migration path for your organization to help you leverage the benefits.

To know more about how Indium can help you, contact us now: