Modernize to Thrive: The First Step to Leveraging Generative AI Is the Cloud
August 31, 2023

Will Perry and Meghna Shah
PwC

Share this

Generative AI has business and tech leaders at a critical crossroad in their companies' modernization journeys: either fundamentally change the way their business transforms IT infrastructure or be left behind.

This necessary shift is not easy. While cloud migration isn't a new concept — and the agility, scalability, and customer-centric design of cloud platforms are all well-proven benefits — many companies still struggle to modernize. Switching core processing from centralized, consolidated, monolithic legacy systems to cloud is the most profound technological change since the start of the mainframe era in 1952.

It's important to note, that simply moving to the cloud or running parts of your business in the cloud is not the same as being cloud-powered. Only about 10% of companies surveyed have achieved this status, according to PwC's 2023 Cloud Business Survey. These companies have reinvented their businesses through cloud, report fewer barriers to realizing value and are doing so at a rate twice that of other companies — these are the businesses that are set up to succeed and get the most out of generative AI.

To fully take advantage of emerging technologies, companies need to ensure their infrastructure is set up for success. How and where to get apps into the cloud is unique to each organization's application portfolio and workload complexity, but there are some techniques that are better than others.

The Leading Ways to Modernize Apps for the Cloud

Several techniques are available when modernizing an app for the cloud — namely, rehost, refactor, re-architect, rebuild and replace. Oftentimes, a combination of these methods is required. What's optimal will depend on the organization's existing environment and the outcomes it's trying to achieve.

Overall, successful application modernization should increase business and IT agility and scalability. Additionally, replatforming and refactoring approaches take advantage of cloud services and solution patterns, making these the most frequently used and effective approaches.

Application modernization typically includes refactoring applications into microservices in containers or functions, leveraging advanced data platforms and services to advance information flow, as well as implementing infrastructure-as-code and DevOps pipelines to automate application development and deployment.

Refactoring Tops the List of Techniques

Refactoring entails a rewrite of both existing applications plus the business processes and rules that interact with the application. This comes with several advantages for realizing the true value of an application modernization effort. For example, with your data and applications in order, cloud-powered companies can turn their attention to leveraging machine learning and AI to reduce costs, add intelligence and overall get things done faster.

Here are the more fundamental benefits:

Operational cost: Trade in CapEx for OpEx as part of modernizing your mainframe; this pay-as-you-go model will help unlock incremental cost savings while reducing the size of the on-premise infrastructure footprint.

Maintainability: Managed services and serverless architecture of cloud platforms provide a low maintenance model, with little time spent on monitoring and patching runtime environments. Cloud and modern application development skill sets are easily found within the market with readily available training resources to upskill existing personnel.

Business agility: Redesigning a mainframe capability will allow you to modernize all three facets of the mainframe — platform, business process and technical debt — resulting in a significantly faster future SDLC and time to market.

Operational excellence: Modern cloud platforms can help to accelerate initiatives such as enhancing the customer experience, creating multi-channel contact centers, providing more real-time data, and automating operations through AI/ML processes.

Work Holistically to Modernize

A holistic approach across business and IT, one that is designed to provide accelerated, sustained business value while powering the digital reinvention, is the key to a successful app modernization initiative.

On the technical side of the application modernization strategy, contrast what portions of your application portfolios are table stakes and which applications are truly market differentiating. Link modernization to your most critical business challenges, this will help determine what's brand defining and sustainably differentiates you from your competition.

You may want to consider automation and orchestration from your native PaaS. This will enable an end-to-end digital journey across the entire application and supporting tool portfolio. It will help eliminate legacy redundancy, technical debt, stovepipe functionality, legacy architectures and business application “lock in” that have built up over the years.

Insource or Outsource: How to Decide

Insightful planning and diligent execution are critical to overcome the common challenges and uncertainty often involved in modernizing applications and moving workloads to the cloud. Determining the right move for your company isn't always a one size fits all answer, but there are a few key places to start.

Generally speaking, an experienced partner can bring industry modernization and migration leading practices with implementation experience to help deliver secure, accurate and business value grounded cloud transformations.

Take into account the following to determine if insource, outsource or a combination is right for you.

Create a business-first, iterative build approach: Start with your business goals, quickly zeroing in on how the right cloud modernization and migration strategy can deliver results.

Build the right plan from the start: Build a flexible cloud foundation that embeds security, compliance and efficiency. Applying iterative techniques that demonstrate value quickly, you'll be able to visualize tangible ROI from the start.

Ensure that the team understands cloud modernization and migration A to Z: Have prescriptive methodologies to help you achieve full-scope transformation from strategy through execution.

Maximize smart and secure automation: Take advantage of mature automation tools to simplify and expedite the process from infrastructure deployment and code release to data transfer, security validation and more.

Risk Versus Reward

Like all transformation and modernization initiatives, there are intrinsic and external challenges. It's important to have a realistic sense of risk management across the business and IT, and appropriately fund the right risk mitigation actions. Risks will span people, organization, process, technology and vendors or third parties.

The sign that an enterprise is well prepared for things not going as planned is a well thought out risk management plan, with appropriate funding in the budget.

Optimizing on emerging technologies like generational AI in a responsible manner and transforming IT into a truly customer-centric, agile and scalable cloud-based platform to ensure short time-to-market and global uniformity of services is vital. Not meeting these demands is a serious risk.

Will Perry is US Cloud Innovation and Engineering Leader at PwC, and Meghna Shah is Cloud Partner at PwC
Share this

The Latest

September 21, 2023

Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds ...

September 20, 2023

IT leaders are driving an increasing number of automation initiatives as a way to stay competitive, reduce costs and scale as they navigate an unpredictable social and economic environment, according to the 2023 State of Automation in IT survey conducted by Jitterbit ...

September 19, 2023

Customer loyalty is changing as retailers get increasingly competitive. More than 75% of consumers say they would end business with a company after a single bad customer experience. This means that just one price discrepancy, inventory mishap or checkout issue in a physical or digital store, could have customers running out to the next store that can provide them with better service. Retailers must be able to predict business outages in advance, and act proactively before an incident occurs, impacting customer experience ...

September 18, 2023
Digital transformation is key to ensuring companies keep up with the competitive market landscape. Putting digital at the core of a business can significantly reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies. However, this process often means changing the way internal teams work with one another. To help with the transition, this blog offers chief experience officers (CXOs) advice on how to lead a successful digital transformation project ...
September 14, 2023

Earlier this year, New Relic conducted a study on observability ... The 2023 Observability Forecast reveals observability's impact on the lives of technical professionals and businesses' bottom lines. Here are 10 key takeaways from the forecast ...

September 13, 2023
On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways ...
September 12, 2023

Only 33% of executives are "very confident" in their ability to operate in a public cloud environment, according to the 2023 State of CloudOps report from NetApp. This represents an increase from 2022 when only 21% reported feeling very confident ...

September 11, 2023

The majority of organizations across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) breached over the last year had personally identifiable information (PII) compromised, but most have not yet modified their data management policies, according to the Cybersecurity and PII Report from ManageEngine ...

September 07, 2023

A large majority of organizations employ more than one cloud automation solution, and this practice creates significant challenges that are resulting in delays and added costs for businesses, according to Why companies lose efficiency and compliance with cloud automation solutions from Broadcom ...

September 06, 2023

Companies have historically relied on tools that warn IT teams when their digital systems are experiencing glitches or attacks. But in an age where consumer loyalty is fickle and hybrid workers' Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is paramount for productivity, companies cannot afford to retroactively deal with IT failures that slow down employee productivity ...