New threats presented by digital disruption as well as ongoing cost reduction pressures are causing many organizations to take a new look at their legacy application portfolio. Determining how to address technical debt and transform legacy applications requires Applications teams to address several big questions including:
- Which applications should we rewrite for cloud native or microservice architectures?
- What opportunities are presented by containers as well as structured and unstructured PaaS platforms?
- Which applications should we replatform or migrate to cloud infrastructure models?
Getting to the right answer isn’t easy. Legacy portfolios are highly complex and interdependent, and often are based on a variety of platforms. In many cases ‘tribal knowledge’ about many key applications has been lost due to employee attrition and ineffective IT management processes. And the issues facing global enterprises seeking to transform large portfolios at scale are even more daunting.
Despite these challenges, there are several key steps that organizations can take to ensure their portfolio transformation program is high impact and drives rapid business value. Successful large-scale portfolio transformation programs we’ve seen tend to have similar approaches that focus on:
- Identifying sources of business value from modernization
- Designing an agile approach to transformation to drive short term impact
- Leveraging tools and automation to create an evergreen process
EMC Global Services brings a unique set of skills, experience and tools to help even the largest enterprise transform and modernize their application portfolios. We look forward to sharing our experiences with you at EMC World and exploring how we can help.