Got a legacy application you need to make cloud-ready? We are here to help.
When planning a move to the cloud, don’t leave your applications behind. Our ethos is simple: we make legacy applications cloud-ready to increase their performance, scalability, and security.
Customer experience is more important now than ever. It determines whether your company takes flight or crashes. Let SR Cloud Solutions help you engage your customers, transform your products, optimise your operations, and enable your employees.
There are many options for your application within Azure, whether you are migrating your application for the first time or looking to innovate further, are you looking to use containers or App services? Microservices? What about Azure DevOps and security?
Our team has the flexibility, agility, and scale to work in the way that suits you. Whether you have an in-house development team that needs cloud infrastructure experts, or you want to make use of our cloud-native app development team. We’ve got you covered.
Our Approach To Modernising Your Applications
There are six ways to bring legacy applications into Azure. Our team of software development engineers are accomplished in each and understand the right time to apply them.
Rehost
Sometimes called "lift-and-shift," this modernisation strategy emphasises speed because it requires practically no code changes. Organisations take apps from their previous environment and transition them as-is to their current environment.
Refactor
Refactoring prioritises productivity as well as speed. With this strategy, apps need only minimal code changes so that they can connect easily to and make the most of a cloud-first environment.
Rearchitect
If an organisation needs cloud scalability, rearchitecting might be the right approach. With rearchitecting, apps functionality and code get modified and extended to scale better in the cloud.
Rebuild
For recreating an app using cloud solutions, rebuilding is sometimes the right option. It's a heavier lift, but it may be essential if existing apps have limited functionality or lifespan.
Replatform
This approach lies in between rehosting and refactoring. With replatforming, organisations make code changes so that apps can be used with cloud technologies.
Replace
If an app won't meet current or future business needs even after rebuilding, replacing it with a ready-made solution may be necessary. This approach can be faster than rebuilding and free up valuable development resources.
Why choose SR Cloud Solutions?
We provide top-tier Azure managed services to help reduce operational risks. Our experts possess the skillset, insights, and experience required to migrate and manage the entirety of your cloud lifecycle with diligence.
We take care of everything from developing personalised cloud solutions to managing workload migrations. When it comes to stellar cloud management and monitoring, we’re the best in the game.
Also, we assist users to reduce security risks and ensure that the firm doesn’t fall victim to modern cloud security problems. From managing multi-cloud environments to ensuring compliance, we take care of it all.
Thus, with our Azure application modernisation services you’ll be able to improve your digital service delivery to customers and staff. Furthermore, you can secure your bottom line, and steadily grow your organisation.
- The best technology – highest levels of accreditation with the world’s leading vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto.
- Skills and expertise with a UK-based 24/7 Service Desk.
- We are a Joscar accredited business which means we are certified to work with leading defense companies who require the highest standards of cyber security.
- We are experts in Cloud infrastructures such as Microsoft Azure so we can provide expert consultancy on migrations, hybrid cloud environments, security, cost optimisations, application modernisation and cloud governance.
Book a meeting with one of our consultants to learn more about our Application Modernisation Services utilising Azure.
Start with an application assessment
Target end state
Identifying what your application’s goals are to identify the best migration methodology
Application dependencies
Assessing the entire application ecosystem to deliver a solution compatible with your environment
IT strategy
Our recommendation will be based on a long-term business view of performance requirements and Azure cost efficiencies
Benefits of Application Modernisation
Accelerated innovation and time to market.
When organisations don't have to devote as much time and resources to maintaining apps and infrastructure, they can spend more time innovating. Cloud-based tools and services further help to streamline the development process, resulting in faster time to market.
Compatibility and agility.
The advantage of modernising apps isn't just that they'll be able to work with the most current technology – they'll keep working even as the technology evolves. This seamlessness allows for quick updates and changes to meet current and future business needs. It can also enable automatic scaling so that apps continue to work well when there are sudden increases in demand, and to instantly reduce costs when there are sudden decreases in demand.
Security and reliability.
With a cloud-first approach, organisations can use built-in updating and security capabilities to help safeguard their workloads. Other built-in features can include task automation for important things like high availability, disaster recovery, backups and performance monitoring.
Efficiency.
When done thoughtfully, it can be easier to modernise existing apps than to create new ones from scratch. That way, organisations can build on existing investments rather than sink time and money into something new. App modernisation also helps to retain many current processes and maintain business continuity compared to plugging completely new apps into existing operations.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Application modernisation is the process of updating an organisation’s existing apps to a cloud-first model – sometimes called legacy modernisation. If an organisation uses on-premises apps, modernisation may involve migrating those apps to a public, private or hybrid cloud. Commonly modernised apps and data include:
- .NET apps
- Linux web apps
- Java apps
- SAP apps
- SQL databases
An organisation’s current software systems and programmes might have been great when they were first implemented, but they may not be able to keep pace with the latest (or future) technology. One approach to tackling this challenge is to start again from scratch – building or buying new apps that are compatible with the most current technology stack available. (While the most current stack is always evolving, some of the most recent drivers of modernisation include new security best practices, scalability requirements and advancements in AI, virtualisation, IoT, containers.) However, this approach can be both costly and time-consuming. And the challenge will persist: Even the most current app can be outpaced by its technology ecosystem.
Instead of starting from scratch by building completely new apps, organisations can modernise the apps that they already have. It’s also important to note that it’s often possible, and more practical, to approach modernising apps in stages. For example, many organisations start by simply moving their apps from their on-premises datacentres to the cloud in a “lift and shift” migration, allowing them to take immediate advantage of the most basic benefits of cloud computing. From there, they can move on to more advanced modernisation techniques, such as rebuilding all or some of the parts of their apps to adopt newer capabilities or best practices.
Application modernisation offers a variety of benefits both for the apps themselves and the organisation modernising them. Key benefits can include increased efficiency, compatibility with cloud technology, improved security, higher availability and accelerated time to market.
“Legacy modernisation” is another way of saying “application modernisation.” However, both older and newer apps can be modernised with cloud technology to achieve greater agility, stability and innovation.
The steps and strategies for successful app modernisation should work towards supporting a framework of organisational goals. For example, the Azure Well-Architected Framework has five architectural pillars geared towards organisational goals – these can be used for app modernisation as well:
- Reliability: The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function.
- Security: Protecting applications and data from threats.
- Cost optimisation: Managing costs to maximise the value delivered.
- Operational excellence: Operations processes that keep a system running in production.
- Performance efficiency: The ability of a system to adapt to changes in load.
The process of modernising an organisation’s apps can be broadly defined by three steps.
- Planning. This first step requires organisations to think carefully about their app modernisation goals and define their strategy before any action is taken. This is the time to discover and assess existing apps and environments in preparation for change.
- Implementation. During this step, organisations build new skills and begin modernising their apps iteratively. An iterative modernisation approach gives organisations the flexibility to change their project scope or strategy as needed.
- Operations. App modernisation is not a one-and-done deal. Once organisations move to a cloud-first approach, they can use cloud platform services and tools to help secure, govern, manage and optimise their apps.
These strategies are distinguished by an organisation’s modernisation goals and the need for code changes to the apps themselves. An app modernisation strategy is defined during the planning step and put into effect during the implementation step.
Rehost. Sometimes called “lift-and-shift,” this modernisation strategy emphasises speed because it requires practically no code changes. Organisations take apps from their previous environment and transition them as-is to their current environment.
Replatform. This approach lies in between rehosting and refactoring. With replatforming, organisations make code changes so that apps can be used with cloud technologies.
Refactor (or repackage). Refactoring prioritises productivity as well as speed. With this strategy, apps need only minimal code changes so that they can connect easily to and make the most of a cloud-first environment.
Rearchitect. If an organisation needs cloud scalability, rearchitecting might be the right approach. With rearchitecting, apps functionality and code get modified and extended to scale better in the cloud.
Rebuild (or rewrite). For recreating an app using cloud solutions, rebuilding is sometimes the right option. It’s a heavier lift, but it may be essential if existing apps have limited functionality or lifespan.
Replace. If an app won’t meet current or future business needs even after rebuilding, replacing it with a ready-made solution may be necessary. This approach can be faster than rebuilding and free up valuable development resources. But replacing apps could pose challenges including interruptions to business processes and limitations to future modernisation initiatives.
Organisations looking to modernise their applications have many ways to go about it. Technologies that support organisations in optimising their IT assets include:
Cloud computing
Internet-based cloud services can increase application performance, efficiency, and scale.
Containers
These packages of software bundle together application code, which enables seamless deployment across multiple environments.
Microservices
This architectural approach makes application development more agile by allowing each core function—also known as a service—to be built independently.
Automation
Third-party services that automatically perform common tasks can help optimise application deployment, management and diagnostics.
AI and machine learning
Intelligent services and solutions help companies mine richer insights from their applications and data.
Speak to one of our Azure EXPERTS
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