Cloud modernization is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. My organization continues to look for ways to drive more flexibility, cost effectiveness, and agility in our application portfolio. The conventional wisdom is that it should be better, faster, and cheaper to run workloads in the cloud. But with a population of aging applications, many of which are running on fully depreciated assets, things are not always as simple as they appear.
The approach that we have used is to look at workloads and prioritize against a number of constructs:
- Hosting cost reduction
- Lighthouse project investment
- Speed to market
- Technology standardization & modernization
- Reduction of technical debt
The goal is to look at the opportunities that yield short-term payback, while also keeping an eye on the opportunities that can be used as “lighthouses” to demonstrate forward-thinking capabilities. Of course, there is an ongoing focus on the elimination of technical debt and how that can help us drive to a more standardized go-forward technological footprint.
We are still relatively early in this journey, but continue to make progress and are optimistic that we’ll continue to move the ball forward.