FEATURE
Ranjith Kaippada, Managing Director at Cloud Box Technologies
Ranjith Kaippada, Managing Director at Cloud Box Technologies, said:“ Both technical debt and legacy applications can be significant barriers that CIOs can face when undergoing digital transformation. This is because most enterprises work on legacy systems carrying the most load of mission-critical tasks, and these are often the ones that can be least affordable for any disruption.”
The problem is rarely confined to the application itself. Ageing databases, infrastructure, security controls, integrations and dependencies can all increase the risk and complexity of transformation.
“ CIOs cannot afford technical debt caused by making hasty decisions, and thus, they require visibility across the application ecosystem, including what applications are active, how each works, how critical they are, what other peripherals they are dependent on, and where technical debt exists. Visibility across such questions helps enterprises during assessment, as they can work their way up to reducing technical debt, complexity, and risk so the business can go through to make better decisions,” said Kaippada.
Understanding the estate is therefore critical before deciding how individual applications should evolve.
According to Godonoga,“ Without properly understanding the application, choosing between these options is largely guesswork. Its age or technology is not enough. You need to understand what it does for the business, which parts are still differentiating, what depends on it and what the target architecture is supposed to achieve.”
External factors, from budgets and licensing changes to data centre moves and market conditions, can also influence whether an organisation rehosts, replatforms, refactors, replaces or retires an application.
“ In large systems, the answer is usually a mixture. Some capabilities can be retired, some replaced and others refactored over time. The decision may need to be made at capability or component level rather than for the whole application,” Godonoga said.
Why cloud is no longer enough
The changing modernisation agenda has also challenged the assumption that cloud migration represents the end of the transformation journey.
Rajendran said:“ Moving an old application onto new infrastructure does not automatically make it a modern application. Cloud can improve scalability, resilience and infrastructure economics, but if the application remains tightly coupled, difficult to change and disconnected from the wider enterprise data environment, the underlying business constraint remains.”
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