Simple is beautiful. Simple is powerful too. But in an era marked by organizational sprawl, either by mergers and acquisitions, entering new markets, adding newer applications and environments, IT has become more and more complex. Add to that the digital layer, dominated by social and mobile apps and the need to adopt data and analytics, and simple seems like an impossible dream.
Modernization offers an opportunity to simplify the complex legacy systems that enable the core value chain. Modernization drives simplicity from the ground up so companies can achieve customer demands for simple solutions and increased market agility without generating higher maintenance costs and spiraling complexity.
Simplification is the need of the hour
Today, more than ever, an enterprise needs to be agile and future-ready in an ever changing business environment and IT needs to be simplified. IT simplification can help companies meet and even exceed customer expectation by responding faster to their needs, increase profitability with centralized and quick decision-making, reduce maintenance and operational costs by consolidating and rationalizing environments, and ensure higher employee productivity by eliminating redundancies and improving system efficiency.
Simplification can be done in several ways: rationalizing and consolidating environments, including datacenters, operating systems (OS) or applications, application modernization, using agile processes and integration and automation tools and processes.
While different business needs will require different simplification approaches, application modernization can help companies reduce complexity and simplify the infrastructure and application layer, helping companies reduce costs and maintenance. Application modernization can also help companies leverage cloud technologies, which in turn help reduce costs and simplify operations.
Simplify your environment with application modernization
Application modernization can transform legacy IT systems into modern, efficient environments, which are critical to sustaining a competitive advantage in today’s increasingly digital world. Application modernization tools like re-architecture, re-host and mid-tier modernization services can simplify infrastructure and operations by replacing legacy systems with flexible components ready for integration.
Even as legacy technologies are considered robust and reliable by many companies, they gain complexity over the years as different layers of operation systems, platforms and applications are added to meet the varied needs of a growing business. Over time an increasingly complex environment becomes costly to run and maintain, and can be rigid and restrict the flexibility of IT to respond to business changes. On the other hand applications that run or modern platforms inherently simplify IT and can help customers improve efficiency, enhance business productivity, and reduce costs.
Transforming legacy workloads into modern service-oriented architectures requires a transformational application modernization method. Re-architecture transforms the logic and business value of legacy applications into modern architectural frameworks, e.g. Java or .NET, which ensures enhanced business agility. Re-architected applications are inherently simplified. They are smaller and easier to maintain, while being able to leverage simplified x86 platforms and infrastructure. Re-architecture also enables application portfolio simplification by consolidating applications. By consolidating applications or environments, companies have fewer environments to manage and maintain, thus increasing efficiency and increasing employee productivity.
Another application modernization method, re-hosting, migrates legacy applications running on mainframes and other proprietary platforms such as AIX, HP-UX and Solaris, to industry-standard x86 infrastructure. Re-hosting and mid-tier modernization helps companies simplify and standardize their IT environment, by enabling platform and data center consolidation on x86, Linux and Windows. This helps companies minimize business disruption and risk and significantly reduces maintenance costs.
Even as organizations consider a re-architecture or re-host approach to their application modernization plan, they should consider creating a modernization roadmap first, which will help them create and implement a long-term modernization strategy. Dell offers customers a strategic modernization roadmap (SMR), which delivers an actionable simplification plan, by optimizing the technical route to the simplification objective. This holistic analysis approach from Dell considers business priorities, technical constraints, and a wide range of modernization approaches to develop a multi-project modernization program plan.
The need for IT simplification can no longer be ignored. It has become a necessity for companies to succeed because it can create a future-ready IT — efficient, effective, and agile. At Dell, we believe the journey for building a future-ready enterprise begins with IT simplification. Click here to find out how Application Modernization can help simplify your IT environment. Or click here to talk to Application Modernization expert.