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.

A quick search of the current technology trends for this year and beyond reveals much of what we expect: the accelerated rate of digitisation in business and society, together with ever-increasing data volumes, have customers asking for stability, security, backup and redundancy, which are reliable and can scale. It’s a complicated task for any organisation.

The legendary Formula 1 commentator Murray Walker once said: “The lead car is absolutely unique, except for the one behind it, which is identical,” many managed service providers (MSP) are discovering specialising in the same solutions and providing the same cloud solutions from Azure, AWS or any of the other hyperscalers, poses another challenge.

When MSPs offer similar solutions, they begin competing on price and risking margin. And the simplicity with which the customer can switch service providers places MSPs and their business at further risk.

The business of cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud is poised to become big business. If it is not on a customer’s technology roadmap yet, it will be soon. For clients of MSPs, cloud solutions for storage, network and processing mean costs and risks of setting up expensive infrastructure to try out new ideas are heavily mitigated. Hybrid solutions, for when public cloud services aren’t suitable, have also matured to the point where they can provide a ‘best of both’ solution.

In much the same way that hardware resellers became MSPs in the late 90s and early 2000s by growing their business by offering additional hardware, software and networking support services to customers, today’s MSPs are going to grow by being able to understand how to leverage the cloud in their client’s environments and offering a unique selling point. Unfortunately, offering the same solution as other MSPs and systems integrators is not it.

Microsoft partners are a dime a dozen, and its Azure services are an easy sell into many organisations, but they do not come without their own challenges. Sporadic outages, little support and surprise price increases are not uncommon. For MSPs competing on price, these issues erode what little margin there was in the deal. It shouldn’t be this way. Not in an environment that is in an intense growth phase.

Clients seek value, not the cheapest solution; the challenge for MSPs is how they define what is unique to them and demonstrate their value.  For MSPs, there’s a good margin to be made, too, but it requires that MSPs step out of the perceived Azure (and other hyperscalers) comfort zone to offer a broader range of services. 

Cloud will grow regardless. However, MSPs who offer value will grow exponentially. This may require a little bit of a learning curve to onboard new technology, but what is often found is that cloud operators, like Routed, will provide world-class support to ensure a smooth transition – something which hyperscalers tend to charge additional fees for.

Partnering with an accredited cloud provider is also more sensible than an MSP building its own cloud. In much the same way the client has a relationship with the MSP to provide outsourced technology solutions, Routed is ideally positioned to offer proven vendor-neutral VMware Cloud solutions.

Routed’s Cloud is simple to provision, manages customer workloads, and offers self-service.  And for those with the ability to set up networks, servers, and applications, setting up and managing the cloud for customers will not require a complex new business strategy and resourcing plan.

Having large workloads move to the cloud is inevitable, but unless MSPs carefully consider how they solve this for their clients, they are putting themselves at risk. MSPs are a valuable part of the ecosystem and sit at a crossroads: take the path most travelled and congested with people who look just like them, or choose the other?

The destination might be the same, but the reward will be greater, not only for the MSP, but for the client, too.