Digital transformation – the adoption of leading-edge technologies to drive business value and customer success – is seen by most organisations as a critical element of success, a reality illuminated by Covid-19 and its consequences. Recent research conducted on behalf of Microsoft shows that while 37% of enterprise organisations have already treated their digital transformation needs, an additional 48% are still addressing them.
Digital Transformation as a Driver of Success
This need to use technology as a value driver pervades every aspect of business today, but no large
organisation is operating a greenfield operation with carte blanche to innovate and accelerate. They
need to work with, through and around existing systems and applications. These so-called legacy
or heritage applications live in on-premises data centres and are the workhorse of most organisations,
responsible for a large portion of their revenue generation.
And there is the rub. Legacy systems are a core asset that drive both revenue and value and ensure
the smooth operation of the business. While maintaining these systems and infrastructure can preserve
value, it generally won’t add to it, and that’s a problem for enterprises looking to transform. These
legacy systems are a source of friction and bottlenecks. For example, enterprise organisations today
have many thousands of traditional applications running on-premises, delivering value to their
owners, but consuming valuable resources, instead of driving innovation.
Rationalisation has long been the dream in such environments, but the reality is that rewriting
applications from scratch is rarely an option. As businesses assess their portfolio of applications,
Costs and Benefits of Application Migration to the Cloud there is a question of whether it makes sense to modernise, rather than replace, an application. Clearly
there needs to be some tangible benefit, or the effort to transform the application would be wasted.
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