The race is now on for businesses across West Africa to modernise. The growing availability of cloud computing resources and infrastructure means that companies can migrate data and workloads into public cloud environments and reap the full benefits of a hybrid cloud strategy that offers greater IT agility, flexibility, and scalability.
Cloud adoption across the continent compares favourably to those in other regions, with one McKinsey survey showing that the majority of companies have already deployed cloud technology to multiple or all business units.
That all said, moving to the cloud is not always a straightforward task. On-premise, monolithic applications can be difficult to update for architectural reasons, are not easily adaptable to meet new customer and company needs, and cannot integrate with third-party systems, thus preventing lucrative business partnerships.
Keep in mind, not every application can live in the public cloud for a variety of reasons. But when it comes to modernising, West African businesses need to know what is best for their applications and the approach they take to their modernisation journey.
One size doesn’t fit all
Application modernisation does not happen all at once. Though it’s commonly accepted now to be essential for business success, IT leaders may opt to first implement small-scale projects before progressing all the way to continuous modernisation.
Taking an incremental approach enables teams to overcome connected challenges and become familiar with new tools and development methodologies.
Application modernisation is also not a monolithic process (unlike many of the applications in question). Organisations will use a variety of strategies relative to the application they’re looking to migrate.
According to the Red Hat State of Application Modernisation report, 85% of applications from surveyed organisations will be modernised using two or three steps.
Those steps include:
- Rehost: Moving applications to the cloud with minimal change (also known as “lift and shift”).
- Replatform: Optimising applications to run in a cloud environment without changing their code or architecture.
- Refactor: Reconfiguring applications to be cloud-native, whether by containerising workloads or moving them to a serverless architecture.
In short, businesses’ modernisation strategies need to align with the needs of each workload, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
When NOT to migrate
Modernising applications does not just entail picking them up and placing them in the public cloud. Case in point, lift and shift may offer benefits such as a quick and easy migration, it is mostly an option for workloads that are “cloud-ready” to some extent, like those built on microservices architecture.
But even before businesses reach the point of formulating their migration plans, they need to be aware of instances where it’s preferable to keep applications on-premise.
For example, legacy applications may be highly entangled with one another or tuned with specific databases and platforms for performance and reliability purposes.
Companies wary of escalating cloud costs may also prefer to keep their data on-premise, or that data may be subject to very strict security considerations. Finally, there may be a question of distance.
Applications that rely on real-time user data interaction or gather data from local IoT devices are better left on-premise along with their database, as moving to a public cloud environment may impact data transfer times.
Culture, process, and technology
When it comes to application modernisation, the ingredient for success is for enterprises to take a holistic approach that combines application platforms and technologies with the greater culture and operations of the organisations.
IT is no longer just limited to a single department or team, and people no longer just sit at the periphery. Employees across the organisation need to come together and collaborate on newfound business objectives.
They do this using standardised and agreed-upon processes and best practices, and help identify and adapt the applications that will deliver the most value.
Lastly, the most mission-critical part of any modernisation effort is the underlying platforms that enable enterprises to build, run, and manage their applications.
Enterprises need to prioritise platforms that support multiple generations of applications while giving them the necessary flexibility and interoperability for guaranteed performance and efficiency.
With the help of vendors and trusted technology partners, enterprises across West Africa can implement a cloud and modernisation strategy that best meets the needs of their organisations. It all starts with a little strategic thinking.
