May 02, 2022
For some companies, the business motivation for modernizing may already be clear, from the need to cut infrastructure costs to performance woes affecting user experience and profits. Others may be aware of the benefits of modernizing, but are unsure what to prioritize or where to start.
Before embarking on any application modernization project, it is important to establish baseline performance metrics and KPIs. This will give you a clear understanding of how the applications are currently performing and what improvements need to be made to grow the business. It will also allow you to track the progress of your modernization efforts and ensure that they are delivering the desired results.
The first critical step is understanding the current state of your application environment. Not only the technical aspects, but also the importance of those applications to the growth and operations of the business.
Application inventory is a catalog of all applications in the organization. It includes relevant information such as supported business capabilities, business and technical owners, workload categories (e.g., business-critical, internal etc.), technology stack, dependencies, incident response and performance metrics, etc..
If you don't have an inventory of your apps, create one by mining your configuration management databases, IT and software architecture spreadsheets and knowledge base, and catalog the full set of applications, assets and code repositories in one central location. For automated app discovery, you can use application migration assessment (AppDynamics, Carbonite, CloudM) and application performance monitoring tools (Splunk, NewRelic, DataDog).
Performance monitoring is the process of collecting, analyzing, and using information to track applications and infrastructure metrics in order to guide business decisions. It gives you insight into your systems and your business so that you can quickly find and fix problems.
Monitoring also helps you communicate information about your systems to people in other areas of the software development and delivery pipeline, and to other parts of the business.
This continuous data gathering and review allows teams to learn and improve, whether in reaction to a production issue, a deployment error, or modifications in customer usage patterns. You can then share these learnings across your organization to help employees develop and systems improve.
Effective performance monitoring requires both:
In the context of application modernization, application and business performance monitoring should be used to capture baseline metrics and KPIs at the start of the modernization iteration, and track progress throughout and at the end of iteration.
Each company's modernization journey will likely be unique. Each organization (and each application) has unique challenges and goals at any one time. It is important to focus the modernization effort on improving metrics and KPIs that align with the organizations current goals.
Even so, there are a few categories of metrics that are commonly tracked and improved during application modernization efforts:
It's easy to lose focus during application modernization efforts and optimize areas that don't have a meaningful impact on your organization's bottom-line. By carefully selecting metrics and KPIs aligned to your business goals, establishing a performance baseline at the start, and continuously assessing progress against it, you can ensure that your modernization project is achieving the desired outcomes.
Application modernization is an essential part of any digital transformation strategy. It helps businesses improve efficiency, reduce costs, and stay ahead of the competition. Application modernization is a structured data-driven iterative process that improves the performance of your application portfolio and helps drive a culture of engineering excellence in your organization.
We are deliberate in our process. We help you uncover what matters and how to measure it. Our experienced architects and engineers make the process of modernizing your legacy apps faster and more cost-efficient. We minimize or avoid service interruptions, and help upskill your employees.
Let's talk through your app modernization goals and create and execute your modernization roadmap. Contact us today to find out how we can help you achieve your business goals.
We employed our expertise in application and database performance optimization to improve system performance for critical execution paths by up to 40%, resulting in faster time to insights for Genus' research team and portfolio managers. As an added benefit, the load on data systems was reduced, delaying the need for costly infrastructure upgrades.
Upgrading legacy software applications can improve efficiency, productivity, and security, integrate with other systems, enhance scalability, save costs, future-proof your business, provide end-to-end data governance, and attract new talent. Investing in application modernization helps companies to stay competitive and succeed in the long run.
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As Responsive begins expanding into new regions, it is imperative that we work with partners who are experts in security, cloud architecture, and best practices for SOC 2 audits.
Our partnership with Aligned was essential for us to meet these technical objectives. We are excited to continue to partner with Aligned and would highly recommend Aligned to any business that wants to solve challenging architectural problems with a focus on security, scalability, and business growth.
Chris Sanford, CTO
Aligned was a fantastic engineering and architecture partner. They spearheaded the architecture and solution design for a key component of our technology platform, and worked with our teams to build it from the ground up.
As a product manager, I admired their ability to understand and effectively communicate the vision and strategy of what we were building to the rest of the engineering team.
In addition, I greatly appreciated their ability to effectively and independently manage our development team. With Aligned in charge, I always had confidence that we were making progress and working on the right thing.
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