Tide of cranky old applications to which the business seems beholden? You know what I mean – everyone hates the application because it’s slow but without it, things just don’t work. If this sounds familiar, the time has come for application modernisation. It couldn’t come at a better time because Microsoft’s Azure cloud provides multiple advantages including low cost, enterprise security, endless scalability and anywhere, any device access.
Which is all well and good, but how, exactly, do you get the basement-dwelling application out from under the stairs and into the cloud?
Now, no two custom applications are quite the same (and that’s part of the problem with legacy applications…it makes them hard to support) which means no two application modernisation approaches are likely to be precisely the same.
Be that as it may, we’ve developed a typical blueprint process which we follow as a general guideline to ‘lift and shift’ your application into the cloud. We call it WADIM. Yep, another acronym in an industry infamous for them!
What WADIM stands for is the following (which should make clear why we follow the process):
- W - Workshop: We work with you to understand core criteria for modernising your application, leading to a personalised solution scope. In this phase, we’ll look at what the application does, any current or anticipated shortcomings and desirable characteristics for the modernised app. Yes, the idea is very much that the ‘new and improved’ app should be better in every way.
- A - Assessment: Our Solution Architect, Development and Infrastructure teams work together to gauge how we can best deliver a solution encompassing modern best practices.
- D - Design: We architect a flexible, sustainable and scalable solution to meet current and future business requirements.
- I - Implement: This is where the real fun starts. We use an Agile-based methodology which follows a sprint-based collaborative process. Or, in other words, we start coding! Agile is useful because it minimises risk in the delivery of a high-performance modern application in the Azure cloud. Small, rapid steps which can easily roll back means the application comes together without major reworks along the way.
- M - Manage: This is the post-modernisation phase. With your application now in Azure and the old one decommissioned, the first few weeks or months are likely to require a bit of special attention to get everything settled down and sorted out. We’ll maintain your modern application and develop new features as required with our Managed Application Services.
The typical Azure migration journey which takes you from an ‘on-premise’ application, through to a serverless state in the cloud. It essentially means moving to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with Microsoft Azure, where your application will be put into a container, (either Docker or Kubernetes) with the application delivered back to the business as a service.
Along the way, your application is rehosted, refactored, rearchitected and rebuilt.
Our customers modernisation success are our best proof of execution. Find out how we helped Infotools modernise a legacy app delivering an improved work experience, while also eliminating a potential risk to the business.
