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Tag: IT modernization

  • Saying Goodbye to Legacy Systems

    Saying Goodbye to Legacy Systems

    Are you still using a rotary phone, tube television or Rolodex? Probably not. But if you were, you’d still be using newer technology than what many enterprises still rely on every day to drive mission-critical applications that we use every day when shopping, banking or hundreds of other normal tasks. 

    At least two-thirds of large enterprises are running mainframe-based apps that date back 10 to 20 years and more than 25% of businesses feature applications that are between 20 or 30 years old. Today, businesses are often running and maintaining legacy applications built on traditional databases while simultaneously building microservices-based apps to accelerate new services and innovations. The mantra “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” certainly applies here; and while there are many reasons organizations continue to rely on mainframes and legacy systems, there are also many organizations that want to begin modernization initiatives but don’t know where to start.

    However, the past few years saw a wave of new digital-first companies in all industries putting pressure on legacy systems-based businesses—from retail to finance to manufacturing to technology. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many organizations’ modernization plans and made clear that for those that wanted or needed to modernize to stay competitive, avoiding the problem just wasn’t an option. Companies found that if they weren’t proactive about modernizing, the cost of being reactive when they needed to update and evolve was exorbitant.  

    Accelerating IT modernization initiatives can be a major challenge: Safely modernizing those legacy apps and mainframe systems and the critical data in them can seem impossible, but it can be done. Companies like Kroger, for example, have already made that jump and there’s a lot to learn from them. Here are three things that can help any enterprise on their journey to say goodbye to mainframes and legacy systems:

    You Need a Frictionless Path for Legacy Apps

    Many modern solutions are only focused on greenfield applications and helping newer born-in-the-cloud companies and projects; however, the reality is most Fortune 1000 companies have a lot of existing applications they can’t afford to ignore or completely rebuild all at once. Supporting existing applications with standard interfaces like Postgres while delivering the scalability and resiliency to support modern applications is critical to providing a bridge from where companies have been to where they are trying to go. Distributed SQL databases provide a seamless path forward to modernize existing apps while supporting new and current initiatives. 

    Embrace Automation

    It’s time to stop relying on complex code or fragile systems with bolted-on third-party tools. Being able to rely on intelligence and automation in the data layer for distribution, resiliency and availability is critical to minimizing changes and impacts on current applications. Doing so will reduce risk, offload legacy app tasks and ensure systems have the intelligence to work properly. With a distributed SQL database, you can deliver a single logical database that appears to applications like a monolithic, single-server database but with the underlying intelligence to allow it to stretch across hybrid, private and public clouds. 

    Finding Flexibility and Becoming Future-Proof

    To avoid being tied to specific systems or architectures, it’s time to adopt a future-proof mindset. Businesses can achieve this through:

    • Multi-cloud/hybrid cloud: With a distributed SQL database, you can deliver a single logical database that looks like a monolithic, single-server database but with the intelligence to stretch across hybrid, private and public clouds—providing the flexibility to be deployed wherever the application is needed or is best served.
    • Any hardware: No two data centers look alike and there are a wide variety of hardware needs, from bare metal to VMs and containers. The right modern distributed database provides ultimate flexibility in where the data layer can be installed to match whatever hardware and configurations are already in use. 
    • Any deployment: Existing organizations have a wide variety of environments and deployment types, from single data centers to two or more private data centers to more and more hybrid environments that span on-premises and public clouds. A modern distributed database provides the freedom to support a wide range of deployment options, including synchronous replication, geo-partitioning and cross-cluster asynchronous replication.  
    • Open source freedom: While many databases provide some open source components, there are still a few 100% open source solutions committed to the Apache 2.0 license. Users can benefit from the full set of enterprise features and capabilities in these open source solutions as well as benefit from the security and transparency that comes with a 100%-open source solution. 

    It’s time to update the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” to “If it ain’t fixed, it could be broke,” with regard to modernizing legacy systems. If you’re considering starting a modernization journey, save time, resources and money now to make upgrades that might later be costly, time-consuming and overwhelming for your internal teams. 

  • IT Modernization Yields Business Benefits Even in Early Stages

    IT Modernization Yields Business Benefits Even in Early Stages

    In recent years, with the emergence of newer technologies ranging from the cloud to machine learning, IT modernization has evolved from a replacement of end-of-life infrastructure to an enabler of innovation and business value. It is a complex process that can take months or even years, but a recent survey shows that the effort begins to deliver measurable results almost as soon as an organization executes the first steps on its roadmap.

    In The State of IT Modernization 2020, an IDG Research Services survey of 200 IT executives commissioned last December by Insight Enterprises’ Cloud + Data Center Transformation team, respondents that had completed 25% or less of their initial modernization objectives reported achieving business improvements in each of the eight categories measured. Sixty-five percent had already achieved better quality of service. Significant progress had also been made in improving customer experience/satisfaction (52%), cost savings (50%), uptime (44%) and the ability to create new revenue-generating products and services (42%). 

    Organizations that had completed their initial modernization objectives reported even better outcomes on all eight measures, notably including the ability to extract business value from data (56%) and faster time to market for new products and services (50%). 

    The findings clearly demonstrate that a modernized IT ecosystem is a core building block of business transformation. Whether it’s spinning up a new service or application quickly, doing a deep data dive to identify new market opportunities or using artificial intelligence to improve sales forecasts or warehouse operations, it’s essential to have the horsepower, agility and advanced data analysis capabilities to do the job.

    The survey of CIOs, CTOs, CSOs and IT directors working at organizations with an average of 29,294 employees also revealed a wide range of details about the status of IT modernization efforts. Let’s look at some examples.

    Progress Made

    Fifty-six percent of the enterprises surveyed have either achieved initial IT modernization objectives or have made significant progress toward doing so, while 19% have made moderate progress and 26% are in the beginning stages. Interestingly, even those in the earliest stages are pursuing emerging technologies such as AI, machine and/or deep learning (43%), automation to support scale-out and other cloud strategies (37%), cloud native application development (35%) and public cloud container services (35%). 

    Projects Derailed 

    Despite this progress, the road to IT modernization can be bumpy. Forty-one percent of survey respondents reported having delayed or abandoned some of their 2019 IT modernization initiatives. The top reasons cited were competing priorities (46%) and lack of a clear roadmap or strategy (45%). Other causes included data security concerns (39%), inadequate in-house expertise (38%), poor preparation (29%) and outdated processes or tools (27%). 

    Shifting Cloud Strategy

    Whether they have just embarked on their IT modernization journey or have made significant progress on their roadmap, organizations continue to grapple with optimizing their cloud strategy. The survey showed that:

    • Ninety-two percent of survey respondents increased workloads deployed in the public cloud and 91% in the private cloud in 2019, reflecting the ongoing increase in cloud adoption as well as migration from one platform to another.  
    • Eighty-nine percent switched or planned to switch from an all-private or all-public cloud strategy to a hybrid cloud approach – and 87% adopted a multicloud approach using more than one public cloud provider – as they attempted to find the right path for their cloud needs.
    • Eighty-four percent moved select workloads from a public cloud to an alternative cloud or non-cloud location, suggesting a failure to perform appropriate cost modeling, workload/platform alignment and other due diligence before the initial move.

    Poor Public Cloud Cost Controls

    More than two-thirds of survey respondents reported that public cloud costs exceeded their expectations, with cost overruns for roughly half that group ranging from 51% to 100%. Most of the causes can be traced to inadequate due diligence, governance or cloud optimization efforts, often due to a lack of in-house expertise in these areas. Examples include: unexpected data egress charges, subscribing to more cloud resources than required, failure to take advantage of vendor volume discounts, lack of knowledge to analyze monthly cloud costs and failure to optimize cloud workloads to extract maximum value from cloud platforms.

    Managed Services

    Adoption of managed services is widespread at every stage of the IT modernization journey, with an average of 95% of respondents outsourcing one or more IT operating environment functions to a managed services provider and 84% outsourcing cloud management. 

    Top Challenges Faced

    Governance is the number one modernization challenge in 2020, according to survey respondents, with new strategies and processes required to ensure control over areas ranging from cloud deployments to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), automation and orchestration, and infrastructure as code. Optimizing and managing the centers of data that are replacing the traditional data center ranks as number two, with workloads located on-premises and in multiple clouds as well as on the edge.

    At the same time, most IT organizations have long-standing cultural and technological norms that need to change in order to move modernization initiatives forward. Hurdles cited elsewhere in the survey range from IT silos to outdated processes and tools, understaffed or underskilled DevOps teams and lack of enabling technology for containerization and automation.

    These challenges also need to be overcome in order to take full advantage of today’s technology to drive innovation, business transformation and the competitive edge that can help businesses both survive and thrive in today’s economy.

  • Survey Finds IT Modernization Efforts Reap Significant Benefits

    Survey Finds IT Modernization Efforts Reap Significant Benefits

    When it comes to the state of IT, few questions weigh more substantially on the minds of CIOs and other business-technology leaders than the degree of success they see in their digital transformation efforts, and foundational to that their efforts to modernize their technology stack.

    In a survey recently released by market research firm IDG, and commissioned by services provider Insight, those enterprises that have managed to reach their initial modernization goals report (25% in this survey) success they say that they can quantify in such areas as cost efficiency, availability and customer experience. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said that their modernization efforts are essential to their digital transformations.

    There were 26% of respondents who said they are at the beginning of their modernization work. Even still, many reporting significant business benefits including improved quality of service (65%), better customer experience/satisfaction (52%), cost savings (50%), uptime (44%) and the creation of revenue-generating products and services (42%).

    The “The State of IT Modernization 2020” survey questioned 200 IT executives at organizations 29,000 employees on average and within a range of industries. The survey examined the maturity of efforts to mature IT operating environments, cloud strategies, applications and processes.

    Of those respondents who stated that they reached their initial modernization goals, 19% report having made moderate progress on those goals and 31% said their development has been significant. Twenty-five percent said they’ve hit their initial goals and are optimizing where possible.

    Despite 59% of respondents reporting moving forward with their modernization efforts, 41% said they have delayed or abandoned those efforts. According to the survey, they did so due to competing priorities (46%), poor roadmap (45%), concerns about data privacy and security (39%), lack of skills (38%), didn’t or couldn’t budget appropriately (30%), and unexpected challenges (30%).

    Not surprisingly, the vast majority of organizations cited cloud optimization as a central part of their modernization efforts and ranked nearly ubiquitous. These included application modification (93%), increasing public cloud workloads (92%) and private clouds (91%), and moving to multi-cloud (87%) or a hybrid-cloud model (89%).

    Further, and what highlights the difficulty some organizations have when finding the optimal home for all of their workloads, 84% said they transferred specific workloads from a public cloud to a non-cloud location. These transitions may have been driven, in part, by the 69% who found their cloud costs to be 62% higher than they expected. The underlying causes of those cost overruns range from “data egress charges for shared persistent data, unplanned cloud adoption, and mergers and acquisitions to failure to take advantage of vendor volume discounts, over-subscription and failure to optimize workloads to extract maximum value from cloud platforms,” Insight said in a statement.

    Finally, the survey found that 95% of respondents are outsourcing at least some facet of their operating environments to a managed services provider. Eighty-four percent said they are outsourcing cloud management.

    Going forward, the most commonly cited priorities include better managing workloads based on their use (39%), improved design to size services to need (38%) and the implementation of additional policies that will restrict the type and size of cloud services made available internally to their organization.

    — George V. Hulme

  • CA Technologies Report Highlights App Modernization Paradox

    CA Technologies Report Highlights App Modernization Paradox

    The rush to modernize IT environments using microservices, application programming interfaces (APIs) and containers may very well turn out to represent something of a double-edged sword.

    A survey of 1,087 IT and business professionals conducted by Frost & Sullivan on behalf of CA Technologies, a unit of Brocade, finds that organizations that have modernized their application environment are eight times more likely to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business. Four out of five respondents also said agile practices are helping them build what customers really need to improve overall customer satisfaction.

    On the downside, however, the study also finds more than half of respondents (56 percent) claimed that software issues can negatively affect the achievement of KPIs. A full 69 percent of all respondents say the pressure to release new applications or updates negatively affects quality and security, and 67 percent admit that their organization sometimes trades off security for application development and deployment speed.

    Nine out of 10 respondents who claimed to widely utilize modern application architectures also concede it’s challenging to manage and monitor APIs, microservices and containers, and that APIs and microservices add new risks for their organizations. A total of 80 percent of respondents also say they view continuous application security testing and DevSecOps as critical components of their strategy to help resolve those issues.

    Ashok Reddy, general manager for DevOps at CA Technologies, said that while organizations are clearly seeing a business benefit after embracing DevOps to modernize their application environments, the process hasn’t always been easy. The challenge they now face is that the rate at which digital business transformation projects are being launched has substantially increased. Most organizations are not going to achieve those goals in a timely fashion unless they modernize their application development and deployment processes, said Reddy, noting that only then can IT become flexible enough to meet the needs of the business versus continuing to try and force the business to bend to the way their applications work.

    The paradox many organizations find themselves wresting with is that making the business more agile requires a more complex approach to IT. In theory, each microservice deployed is easier to manage than a monolithic application. But as thousands of microservices get deployed, the number of dependencies between services becomes more than the average IT organization can track. In fact, all those dependencies is one reason more organizations are starting to investigate applying machine and deep learning algorithms within the context of an artificial intelligence (AI) model to automate IT management at scale. Clearly, most IT organizations are now on a journey that starts with a simple set of microservices and ends up fundamentally transforming enterprise IT, regardless of whether anyone likes it.

    It may take a while longer before the future of IT becomes a completely settled question. But for now, it’s apparent microservices in some regards are too much of good thing. The challenge is that from a digital business perspective, those microservices have become something most organizations can’t do without.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Reality of Cloud Migration: It Gets Worse Before it Gets Better

    The Reality of Cloud Migration: It Gets Worse Before it Gets Better

    The IRS dominated headlines last month when a computer glitch arose—on Tax Day—that prevented the agency from collecting millions of tax returns and forced a deadline extension. But beneath the bevy of predictable, “embarrassing government snafu” stories lies a greater, more systemic problem: IT modernization. Specifically, the potential consequences of not modernizing.

    The advantages of modernization are well-understood: agility, flexibility, innovation, scalability. But it’s also understandable why organizations—particularly large organizations such as the IRS—would be hesitant about modernizing. The organization has been relying on the same computers and systems for decades. And for the most part, those computers and systems have been working for decades. With change comes risk and uncertainty, not to mention extensive time and effort. Though tech vendors say modernization is “seamless” and “easily attainable,” we know that’s not the whole story. The truth is, it gets worse before it gets better.

    A Harsh Reality

    Cloud migration is a prime example. A CIO I once worked with compared legacy applications to the Egyptian pyramids: massive, complex and everyone with knowledge of how they were built is long gone. On top of that basic skills challenge, you and your teams have to work double duty to keep the lights on with existing operations while migrating to the cloud. The harsh reality is that when you migrate traditional applications to the cloud, the total size and complexity of your workload will increase before it decreases.

    Successful cloud migrations begin by confronting the following facts head-on so you’re prepared for what lies ahead.

    The Job Will Be Bigger Than It At First Appears

    Much like the pyramids, you begin with excavation and inventory. You need to get inside your applications and understand their dependencies as well as their current role within your business. This is time-consuming work—you pull on a thread and it typically doesn’t end until you’ve inventoried most of your applications. The thread quickly gets long, looped and wrapped around you. All you have are knots.

    Untie the knots one by one. In time the thread will straighten and you’ll have new insight into your systems. This is valuable with or without the cloud. After inventorying your portfolio, look for quick victories by finding systems that are self-contained yet important to the business and clearly in need of improvement. Tackle systems with complex dependencies after you have some practice and success with important but self-contained applications.

    The Day-to-Day Gets Flipped on Its Head 

    Teams are often initially eager, but will push back when change actually begins. People don’t like altering their responsibilities, there are initially many unknowns and, of course, double duty means more work than ever. Don’t segregate teams working on cloud migration because they will find it difficult to enlist the broad support they need. Make migration everyone’s duty. At this state, leadership is critical. Transparently and specifically communicate objectives and potential barriers. Get feedback and adjust, but don’t lose sight of the ultimate target. Lead by example, whether it’s attending more meetings with direct reports or holding office hours. Keep the flow of information steady to make sure everyone knows “why” as much as “what.”

    You’ll Straddle Two Worlds for a While

    Successful “big bang” transformations are a myth. In the real world, you can’t just shove your legacy technology aside for the newer, shinier versions all at once. Nor can you make your traditional applications act like cloud-native apps with a few tweaks. You’ll need to maintain the status quo as you modernize toward a new approach. Understand that you won’t become a cloud-native continuous delivery shop overnight. Accept time and cost in maintaining what you have as you modernize toward what you want to be.

    Done well, migrating and modernizing in the cloud will improve efficiency, clean up cruft and speed innovation. To realize those benefits, however, you must first understand what you have today then lead your organization to change. Since no business can simply start over, you must plan to maintain existing systems in parallel with cloud migration and modernization. Start your effort assuming you will find unexpected dependencies, unwilling participants and inconsistent security postures of your own systems. Expecting these problems will prepare you and your teams to handle them. Don’t grab a cloud-hammer and treat everything like a nail—use the right solution for each application. The ultimate goal is not to get into something but instead to get ahead of business demands. There is no single route to successful cloud migration, so keep your options open and let your goals dictate your technology decisions. Plan for life to get more difficult before it gets better and the payoff will be well worth the investment.

    — Brad Schick