Digital Transformation Drives App Modernization

Enterprise application platforms, unlike vintage cars, don’t increase in value with age. At some point, every organization will look at the list of their legacy platforms and consider a modernization strategy. Luckily, modern multicloud development techniques and architecture allow you to create custom solutions that can cost less than licensed software, scale effortlessly and increase business agility. Here are four big benefits that organizations can achieve by creating cloud-native applications that can run nearly anywhere.

The use of microservices and serverless applications has led to significant cost savings for many organizations. Cloud-based Platform as a Service solutions, priced using a pay-per-use model, can reduce maintenance, backups, monitoring and IT costs — and you pay only for the services you actually use. Through proper application architecture, you can operate a service that handles millions of requests per month for an amazingly low monthly cost.

Gone are the days when an IT staff must install more hardware in an emergency to handle server load. Modern applications that use technologies such as containerization and Kubernetes can automatically scale and heal as needed, without manual intervention or downtime. When you modernize your application platforms, your services will be able to handle a million users just as well as the one. No matter what cloud platform you decide to use, the tooling and services are there to handle the performance you need.

The more an organization relies on managed cloud platforms and services, the more the IT burdens associated with legacy applications disappear. Organizations can simply deploy their code, and as long as it’s well written, they know it’s going to run smoothly. The key here is to deploy automation through continuous integration and continuous deployment. At CDW, we deploy our applications with solid testing coverage in automated pipelines that allows us to provide guaranteed, free fixes if there is a bug in our code, without requiring customers to pay for a support contract. That’s how confident we are in the streamlined management benefits of app modernization.

Traditionally, software development teams might update an application once, maybe twice, a year. The entire app would be rereleased, and users would need to wait for the scheduled update to receive access to any new features. But with a modernized, microservices-centered approach, development teams are constantly pushing out updates. This is what’s known as shifting from a “waterfall” method to an agile method of development. More important than the terminology, though, are the results: putting powerful tools into users’ hands more quickly.

Story by Brian McBride, the leader of the application and architecture team at IGNW, a CDW company. He develops solutions, solves customer problems and experiments with better ways to build, deploy and manage software solutions.