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The Benefits of Application Modernization in Government

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The Benefits of Application Modernization in Government

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Once agency IT leaders decide to modernize their applications, they can start reaping the benefits of doing so. They will reduce the total cost of ownership of those apps, their applications will run faster and more efficiently, and apps will be more scalable and more easily updated as they shift them onto cloud-based platforms.

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Technology Solutions That Drive Government

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Why Should Agencies Modernize Applications?

A key reason to modernize applications is to reduce the agency's total cost of ownership for running them. Modernizing forces agencies to clear out the dead wood in their application portfolios.

Agencies often have more applications than they realize. For example, before it started modernizing its app portfolio, the Defense Logistics Agency had more than 1,300 systems and 194 applications, Federal News Network reports. Many applications in environments are enterprise supported while others are shadow IT.

Maintaining a lot of legacy apps means IT staff need to dedicate time and resources to managing them. The process of modernization involves looking at applications and determining which ones can be moved to a Platform as a Service cloud environment. This allows agencies to deconstruct monolithic legacy applications into different modules or web applications for specific functions, leveraging application programming interfaces. Those APIs can call out to middleware and still pull in data from legacy databases.

The point is, at the end of the day, it is much easier to upgrade the front end of applications using modern programming languages than to maintain legacy applications running old ones.

For one, it obviates the need to hire expensive outside consultants who may be the only ones capable of helping an agency manage an application still running on COBOL.

It also eats up an agency's time and resources to maintain older applications that may not be as secure as they should be because they can no longer be patched.

Agency IT leaders should use tools such as Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework to go through their application portfolios to determine whether apps are valuable, should be abandoned or should be modernized. Doing so will save time and resources in the long run.
MORE FROM FEDTECH: Follow the 5 R's of rationalization for an effective cloud migration.
Gain Scalability and Flexibility in the Cloud

When agencies decide to shift applications to the cloud, they are changing their cost structure but also gaining the benefits of scalability and agility.

By moving applications to the cloud, agencies can start paying for them on a utilization basis, in which the usage meter is running and the bill comes due at the end of the month.

Moving apps to a Platform as a Service offering from Microsoft, AWS or any other cloud service provider allows agencies to abstract the entire application stack below the app layer itself. Such platforms are built to be scalable. If, say, an agency migrates a legacy human resources application to the cloud, that application can be scaled up during the few times per year when the agency has a hiring fair and knows it will receive 10 times the amount of job applications it normally does. When that time passes, the resources needed to support the app can be scaled down.

Moving applications to the cloud also allows agencies to more frequently and easily update them. Apps can be updated with bug fixes more readily, and security patches can be added more quickly.

Application modernization should be a no-brainer for IT leaders and their teams in government. Such modernization cuts down on costs and brings scalability and flexibility that cannot be achieved in a legacy environment. Now is the time to get started on rationalizing and modernizing your application portfolio.

This article is part of FedTech 's CapITal blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #FedIT hashtag.

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The Benefits of Application Modernization in Government

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A key reason to modernize applications is to reduce the agency's total cost of ownership for running them. Modernizing forces agencies to clear out the dead wood in their application portfolios. Agencies often have more applications than they realize.

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is the practice of updating older software for newer computing approaches, including newer languages, frameworks and infrastructure platforms. This practice is also sometimes called legacy modernization or legacy application modernization. It is the software development equivalent of renovating an older home to take advantage of improvements to efficiency, safety, structural integrity and so forth.

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Common patterns for modernizing applications include:

Sometimes called rehosting, t he phrase "lift and shift" has become software development lingo for taking an existing application and moving it from a legacy environment (such as an on-premises server) to newer infrastructure, such as a platform. With this pattern, you are essentially moving the application "as is," with little to no changes to its underlying code or architecture. This means it is usually the least intensive approach, but not always the optimal approach depending on the application in question

foundational strategy for successful legacy modernization is to conduct a thorough assessment of candidate applications. This analysis should include an evaluation of the app's technical characteristics, its suitability for a or similar shift, the ROI of such a modernization, the application's interdependencies with other systems and other criteria.

Key technologies for application modernization

There are several intersecting technologies fundamental to application modernization.

When people discuss application modernization, they are referring to the process of migrating traditional applications to run in modern cloud environments. These include public cloud platforms, private clouds and hybrid clouds (which usually refer to public and/or private clouds integrated with on-premises environments.)

Orchestratio n in software development refers to the automation of many of the operational tasks associated with containers, including deployment, scaling and networking. Automation in general is an important principle and technology, as it is increasingly necessary to ensure that development, operations and security teams can sustainably manage their modern apps at scale.

Why do enterprises need application modernization?

Few companies are willing or able to simply retire these applications and start over; the costs, productivity losses and other issues are too great. Therefore, application modernization is the most sensible way for many enterprises to realize the advantage of newer software platforms, tools, architectures, and frameworks.

Two of the most significant trends in legacy app modernization are multi-cloud and hybrid cloud . Multi-cloud refers to using two or more public cloud services for cost optimization, flexibility, availability and other reasons. Hybrid cloud refers to a mix of public and private cloud as well as on-premises infrastructure, usually with integration between these environments.

M odernization helps softw are teams optimize existing application s for these more distributed computing paradigms, rather than requiring them to rebuild their critical applications from scratch. As a result, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are two of the most prominent catalysts for legacy modernization.

A related modernization trend is the IT industry's embrace of containers and orchestration as a means for packaging, deploying and managing applications and workloads. While you can containerize a legacy app, containers are viewed as an optimal fit for a more decoupled approach to development and operations-namely, microservices architecture.

VMware Application Modernization related products, solutions, and resources

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Common patterns for modernizing applications include: Sometimes called rehosting, t he phrase "lift and shift" has become software development lingo for taking an existing application and moving it from a legacy environment (such as an on-premises server) to newer infrastructure, such as a platform.

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The Importance and Benefits of Application Modernization

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The Importance and Benefits of Application Modernization

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Application modernization is possible thanks to the use of the cloud. Any business, no matter how big or small, can take advantage of this. Modernizing your applications is very important and also has a lot of benefits. Let’s take a look at some of them and why you need to implement application modernization.

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Lilach Bullock: Your Guide To Digital Marketing, Tools and Growth

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The Importance and Benefits of Application Modernization

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Application Modernization is a must do: here’s why it’s so important to focus on application modernization and what are the benefits for doing so

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3 key enablers to modernizing your data-centric application estate

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3 key enablers to modernizing your data-centric application estate

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Speed and agility continue to drive how companies differentiate. In today’s highly competitive environment, rapid application development and deployment is essential to helping businesses react and pivot. The ability to build apps quickly allows businesses to zig and zag with ease to respond to customer needs and capture revenue opportunities from major market changes

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Speed and agility continue to drive how companies differentiate. In today's highly competitive environment, rapid application development and deployment is essential to helping businesses react and pivot. The ability to build apps quickly allows businesses to zig and zag with ease to respond to customer needs and capture revenue opportunities from major market changes - whether that's a global pandemic, new disruptive competitors, or supply chain interruption.

Containers to the rescue

If you've been asked (or forced) to develop and deploy applications faster or to modernize your application estate, you've probably already heard of containers or Docker or Kubernetes orchestration. Containers have taken the world by storm and are key to enabling application modernization for several reasons. They're portable from edge to cloud, they add agility to DevOps processes, and they bring simplicity and speed to application development and deployment.

The good news is, if you're just getting around to modernizing your data and application estate - you're not too late. 'Application modernization' was once reserved for cloud native and microservices-based apps, but now there's a revolution underway to take those same techniques and apply them to your entire stateful, data-centric estate. Data scientists and IT admins have caught on to the modern trend to keep up with their rapidly changing toolkits and the fact that it often makes sense to develop in one location and deploy in another. In a recent study, 451 Research found that 94% ¹ of AI workloads delivered by 2022 will be deployed via self-service containers for these data- and analytic-centric workloads.

Today's enterprise application modernization is multi-cloud for data analytics

451 Research estimates that nearly two-thirds ² of today's current application estate still needs to be modernized. In general, that means the easy 'lift and shift' work has already been done - so now it's time to tackle the difficult clustered applications, data-centric applications, and analytic-heavy solutions.

Another trend I'm seeing is that single location deployments, be it on-premises or in a particular public cloud, limit application agility. The new reality is multi-cloud first architecture, and 451 Research findings show that to-be modernized workloads will be split 46% on-premises and 54% ³ cloud deployments. This means you need to architect for multi-cloud.

ISVs and open source are key to modernizing the remaining 63% of workloads

So what happens when the easy 'lift and shift' work is done and the piecemeal parts have been modernized? Unfortunately, unless enterprises want to completely re-architect their apps on their own, the majority of the remaining 63% of workloads are dependent on external modernization efforts. They require innovation by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and the open-source community, the two other key enablers of app modernization, to move them from monolithic to loosely-coupled deployments optimized for Kubernetes deployments.

This trend is in full swing. I've witnessed ISVs like Dataiku, H2O.ai, and others spending the last few years optimizing solutions for the public cloud. They've recently realized that a big chunk of their customer's workloads are actually still on-premises so they've changed their focus - bringing this innovation to solution providers who can deliver on-premises performance and security and provide the bridge for consistent multi-cloud deployments.

Even big names like Splunk and SAS have taken this path with their monolithic software to take advantage of modern, agile, and efficient K8s-based deployments. Splunk stands out to me because I was part of a major validation and benchmark with their beta Splunk operator for Kubernetes last year. We worked with a major US bank who couldn't physically scale the infrastructure to keep up with data growth rates. Running the traditional deployment of a single indexer or search head per server resulted in extremely low CPU utilization, requiring massive over deployment of infrastructure to keep pace with data growth. It took weeks to deploy new workloads, and as their data centers approached near maximum capacity, indexing fell behind - creating security blind spots. As a result, the bank was forced to find ways to optimize their delivery and consumption of Splunk.

Leveraging Splunk's new operator for K8s, we were able to modernize the delivery of Splunk using containers to take full advantage of the optimized infrastructure to drive utilization and throughput. In minutes, we were able to independently scale from 1 to 6, and up to 12 indexers per host delivering an astounding 17X indexer throughput improvement (8.7 TB/day per host) and driving CPU saturation up to 70%.

I skipped over a lot of the details that required tight collaboration between HPE, Intel, Scality, and Splunk - but the point is that the customer needed the ISV to do the work to modernize their application. This in turn allowed them to fundamentally change the way this solution is deployed. As a result, we eliminated the security data blind spot with up to 17X higher data ingestion and indexing per host, flipped the TCO model by shrinking the infrastructure footprint by up to 10x, quickly addressed new use cases deploying new indexers and search heads in minutes, and balanced hot cache and S3 object storage for exabyte scale. And we even delivered the solution as a service!

As open-source software has become a key driver for modernizing existing workloads, enterprises have really warmed to open-source components over the past decade -especially in the data science and data engineering communities. While most of the more recent tools are developed as cloud native out of the gates, many of the established and most widely deployed tools are still in the process of modernizing.

Apache Spark is the most obvious example of this. First released in 2009, it is now a key component of most open data analytics platforms for ETL, data science, and data engineering. As companies move away from Hadoop, Spark has evolved from deploying Spark on YARN to Spark on Kubernetes.

Fast forward to 2021 and Spark's modernization efforts have paid off. The new Spark 3.x operator is now ready for primetime - delivering native GPU acceleration capabilities, S3 integration, and significant resiliency improvements. This type of open-source modernization will go a long way to modernizing that 63% of workloads that remain - and we're already seeing the container platforms and cloud offerings integrate in the new Spark operator to provide the surrounding components to make it enterprise grade.

To learn more

With organizations still needing to modernize two-thirds of their current application estate, assembling the right key enablers such as containers, ISVs, and open-source software is essential and now within reach. Want to explore more about how to modernize your stateful, data-centric applications? Here are a few options to allow you to go deeper on this concept.

Read the Pathfinder research paper from 451 Research, Application Modernization and the Age of Insight, and attend my session at HPE's Discover 2021 on how Containers Are Driving Digital Transformation. If you prefer pictures, you'll enjoy this eBook, Fuel Edge-to-Cloud Digital Transformations, for real stories on how companies are successfully collaborating with HPE Ezmeral, ISV partners, and open source to modernize their data-centric applications.
1,2,3 Pathfinder paper by 451 Research - Application Modernization and the Age of Insight, published June 2 2021
____________________________________

About Matthew Hausmann

Matt's passion is figuring out how to leverage data, analytics, and technology to deliver transformative solutions that improve business outcomes. Over the past decades, he has worked for innovative start-ups and information technology giants with roles spanning business analytics consulting, product marketing, and application engineering. Matt has been privileged to collaborate with hundreds of companies and experts on ways to constantly improve how we turn data into insights.

Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.

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3 key enablers to modernizing your data-centric application estate

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Speed and agility continue to drive how companies differentiate. In today's highly competitive environment, rapid application development and deployment is essential to helping businesses react and pivot. The ability to build apps quickly allows businesses to zig and zag with ease to respond to customer needs and capture revenue opportunities from major market changes - whether that's a global pandemic, new disruptive competitors, or supply chain interruption.

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What IT Leaders Need To Know About Application Modernization

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What IT Leaders Need To Know About Application Modernization

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Moving to the cloud is a great opportunity for application modernization. Database applications, in particular, stand out. Not only are they some of the most critical applications, they are also the ones hardest to modernize. When migrating to a cloud database, dependent applications typically require significant modifications.

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Moving to the cloud is a great opportunity for application modernization. Database applications, in particular, stand out. Not only are they some of the most critical applications, they are also the ones hardest to modernize. When migrating to a cloud database, dependent applications typically require significant modifications. Often so fundamental that a complete rewrite appears as the only solution.

IT leaders find themselves in a challenging position. Adopting a cloud-native database is clearly superior to moving a legacy database into the cloud. However, rewriting large numbers of applications as part of the migration is a daunting task. It will disrupt the business and ensnare IT in a costly multi-year migration project. Add to that the low rate of success of database migrations and it becomes clear why IT is hesitant to commit.

What are IT leaders to make of the situation? In the end, the lion share of a migration project is not actually about modernization. It is about making existing applications work with a new database. This situation is about to change. Technology advances in the form of database system virtualization offer a solution that optimizes business objectives: adopt new database technology rapidly without sacrificing long-standing investments in app development.

This won't be the last database

IT leaders often approach a database migration as if it were the last migration - ever. Much of that is wishful thinking. Because migrations are so costly and time-consuming, they treat it as a single choice during their tenure. This puts extra pressure on the decision. The room for mistakes narrows quickly if you have only one shot at the problem during your tenure.

However, even within the ecosystem of a single cloud, chances are the business will need to move between data systems. Some workloads go to the cloud data warehouse, others to operational systems. Over time they may move back and forth.

In addition, any new database technology tomorrow may emerge as a strong competitive advantage. If only the enterprises can adopt it quickly. Today, every major enterprise operates a large variety of databases. Every such database is reflective of the state of the art at its time of introduction. Every one that is still operating despite being outdated is a reminder that a part of the enterprise is stuck in the past.

Being agile in adoption of database systems is more critical than ever.

If it isn't broken, don't fix it

Ask any IT leader how the last database migration went, and you will get similar responses. They are viewed as a necessary evil. Deep down, they keep wondering if the money spent on a migration would have been better deployed toward generating new revenue. Over 90% of applications are typically rewritten just to make them work with the new database. No new functionality is actually created.

Moreover, applications are not rebuilt with the same functionality. Frequently, the applications are compromised in the process to avoid delays.

Today's conventional migration approaches perpetuate this pattern. Oftentimes, a complete rewrite is prescribed as a solution to phase out legacy databases. Ironically, the cost of migration has come to be viewed as the tax of adopting new technology.

What if instead of migrating, you could preserve most applications and focus on the few that could truly benefit from modernization? The good news is database system virtualization enables just that.

Database system virtualization unlocks the best of both worlds

CIOs have to navigate a challenging situation. Any number of external factors may demand swift action: an upcoming timeline for vacating the data center, the requirements for high-availability, or the fact that a legacy vendor charges what feels like extortionary fees. Even those who moved to a 3rd party database in the cloud often look to go cloud-native.

Database system virtualization offers a powerful alternative. By extending the principles of virtualization to the database stack, database system virtualization decouples applications and databases. With database system virtualization, applications written for a legacy system run seamlessly on a cloud-native database system. This includes cloud data warehouses but also OLTP databases.

With database system virtualization, enterprises are unlocking the best of both worlds. (1) Long-standing investments in business-critical applications are preserved. Applications get replatformed to the new destination rapidly, without a re-write and eliminating the business disruptions. (2) New applications can be developed immediately on the new cloud database platform.

What's next?

IT leaders have a full plate. Generating new revenue and outperforming the competition is not accomplished by rewriting perfectly good applications. Instead, adopting a new database platform like a cloud database can be a perfect launch pad for the new initiatives.

By leveraging database system virtualization, old and new applications can exist side-by-side independent of which database they were originally developed for. Shared data and shared infrastructure bring about critical efficiencies. Best of all, the massive cost savings of avoiding a manual migration can be deployed directly to building new applications and generating new revenue.

Database system virtualization may be still a new technology, but it is already giving leading enterprises an edge. It is backed by some of the biggest names in data technology and all cloud providers. IT leaders will be pleased to know draconian measures like manual or tool-aided database migrations will very soon be a thing of the past.
About the author: Mike Waas is the founder and CEO of Datometry, a SaaS database virtualization platform enabling existing applications to run natively on modern cloud data management systems without being rewritten. He has held senior engineering positions at Microsoft, Amazon, EMC, and Pivotal and is the architect of Greenplum's ORCA query optimizer. He has 40+ scientific peer-reviewed publications and holds 20+ patents. Related Items: Is Now the Time for Database Virtualization? Database Migrations Shift Into High Gear Cloud Now Default Platform for Databases, Gartner Says

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What IT Leaders Need To Know About Application Modernization

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Moving to the cloud is a great opportunity for application modernization. Database applications, in particular, stand out. Not only are they some of the most critical applications, they are also the ones hardest to modernize. When migrating to a cloud database, dependent applications typically require significant modifications.

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Application Modernization: One of the critical levers of Digital Transformation - ET CIO

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Application Modernization: One of the critical levers of Digital Transformation - ET CIO

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IT leaders find themselves in a challenging position. Adopting a cloud-native database is clearly superior to moving a legacy database into the cloud. However, rewriting large numbers of applications as part of the migration is a daunting task.

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Application Modernization: One of the critical levers of Digital Transformation - ET CIO

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Enterprises need to expedite their app modernization to provide the agility and scalability to business, and ensure better preparedness for another un..

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Top Three Signs It's Time to Modernize your Business Legacy Software

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Top Three Signs It's Time to Modernize your Business Legacy Software

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Every legacy system needs modernization to transform digitally and stay competitive, In this post, we discuss key reasons why system modernization is important.

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It is not news that we currently live in a highly digital age, where not only people but businesses too have come to rely extensively on digital tools and technologies. Despite the clear transition, there remain some companies that struggle with myriad issues such as reduced productivity, poor business growth, etc. Often, the root cause of these issues is found in the legacy systems and apps such organizations continue to use even in today's day and age.

You would agree every software infrastructure requires upgrades on a timely basis to keep pace with the ever-evolving technology landscape. The legacy applications tend to become obsolete at some point during their lifecycle. Further, the legacy application modernization process though might be expensive and time-consuming. Also, there are complications involved in handling business data.

If you are wondering if it is about time that your company embraced newer technologies, here are some signs that demonstrate an urgent need for legacy application modernization.

1. Regular malfunctions and crashes: One of the biggest signs that your company urgently needs legacy application modernization is when users of these apps and solutions start to experience regular malfunctions and crashes. So, if you too have been struggling with frequent system crashes, speed-related issues, etc., you know it is time for an upgrade.

2. Growing cost of maintenance: As software and hardware grow old, they become obsolete. Such obsoletion does not only cause performance issues and other challenges but also cause companies to pay increasing costs for the maintenance of such systems and applications.

3. Disproportionate hardware dependency: Companies that continue to rely on legacy, on-premise systems for their operations are bound to suffer the brunt of disproportionate and, frankly, unnecessary dependency on hardware. As you can imagine, this is not an ideal situation to be in, especially in the age of cloud computing.

Before we wrap this up, allow us to also walk you through some key reasons why a modern company should consider modernizing its legacy software.

1. Better performance: One of the biggest disadvantages of obsolete systems is that they severely impede the business' performance. After all, when a company fails to embrace modern technologies, how will it sufficiently fulfill the expectations of the market and those of the customers it serves within it.

2. Top-notch security: Sure enough, when you first adopted your systems they seemed to offer impressive enough security features. However, the thing about technologies is that they evolve and, thus, so do security requirements. Consequently, old systems struggle to offer sufficient security and become more prone to security risks.

3. Scalability: For any modern business worth its salt, it is imperative for its systems to quickly adapt to the growth the company achieves. Unfortunately, this can prove to be quite challenging if the business is based on legacy systems involving archaic technologies. Think about it - how are the software and other infrastructure supposed to enable the business' growth when they simply cannot keep pace with the continually evolving requirements of the company as well as those of the market.

We will be honest - the modernization of legacy software is not an easy task by any measure. It is a long and arduous process that involves a plethora of complex factors and whatnot. Yet, experts cannot recommend it enough. Why? Well, as the above discussion demonstrates, even though legacy software modernization is a decidedly Herculean task, it stands to deliver a world of benefits to companies with the foresight to undertake the process. However, to achieve the proclaimed benefits of this process, one must proceed with a precise strategy in mind. Or you could simply engage the services of a trusted legacy application modernization services provider.

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Main Signs That Show Your Legacy Systems Need to Be Modernized

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It is not news that we currently live in a highly digital age, where not only people but businesses too have come to rely extensively on digital tools and technologies. Despite the clear transition, there remain some companies that struggle with myriad issues such as reduced productivity, poor business growth, etc.