How to Evaluate Your App Portfolio for Application Modernization Services

It’s only a matter of time when apps and operating systems need updating. That’s especially true if your company is considering moving to—or has moved—the cloud.

In fact, when it comes to your applications, there’s a formal process called modernization readiness. 

Gartner, the worldwide technological consultant, defines the process as the migration of legacy to new applications or platforms, including the integration of new functionality to provide the latest functions to the business.  

How to Evaluate Your Legacy System for Application Modernization

Gartner states that you can use six main drivers to evaluate your legacy system, 3 coming from a business perspective and 3 from IT:

Business perspective:  fit, value, and agility 

If your legacy application doesn’t meet digital business requirements, it needs to be modernized to fit properly to provide greater business value.

IT perspective: cost, complexity, and risk.

If the total cost of ownership is too high, the complexity too complex, or if security, compliance, support, or scalability are being compromised, it’s time to modernize.

The AWS Application Modernization Readiness Assessment

Before you begin modernizing, you need to do a detailed audit of your current platform. Amazon Web Services (AWS) recommends a professional assessment to evaluate your organization’s application portfolio. 

The goal? To determine the business, functional, technical, and financial impact of your applications portfolio. And inform you as to how well your company can support the future state architecture of your applications after modernization. 

An AWS readiness assessment spreads four tasks over two weeks:

1. Schedule the readiness assessment meeting and require attendance

Suggested attendees include CEO, CTO, CIO, managing director, business unit owners, IT finance, and security, network, application development, infrastructure, and operations leaders. 

2. Conduct interviews with key stakeholders or personas for each application suite

To help define your modernization strategy:

• Identify a prioritized short list of critical business outcomes that could be delivered as part of your modernization initiative.
• Capture current technical capabilities, architectures, and skill sets about the identified business outcomes.
• Identify key stakeholders (e.g., a cloud leadership team, cloud business office, and cloud platform engineering team) to participate in critical operating model mechanisms.

3. Gather and analyze information, document observations, and determine next steps

This can be done through five lenses: strategic or business fit, functional adequacy, technical adequacy, financial fit, and technology adoption readiness.

Technology adoption readiness refers to the extent to which your organization is prepared to adopt and effectively utilize digital technologies and processes. Understanding your digital readiness is crucial for identifying the necessary steps to ensure a successful transition during the application modernization process.

4. Schedule and conduct a debrief meeting.

Validate findings to build a roadmap that outlines the business plans discussed, risk factors identified, and implementation paths for each application.

Contact StratusGrid today for a comprehensive AWS Application Modernization Readiness Assessment. Our team of experts will guide you through a detailed evaluation of your organization's application portfolio, ensuring you're fully prepared for a successful modernization process. 

3 Application Modernization Assessment Outcomes

Following the AWS readiness assessment, you should expect three outcomes from a modernization readiness review:

1. A roadmap for modernizing core business applications, including capture of business benefits, risk factors, and dependencies.
2. An application modernization blueprint to specify the technical and functional architecture for the target state of a modernized application, for one or two applications. This blueprint includes a proof of concept for delivering a minimum viable product (MVP).
3. An action plan to resolve the identified gaps, so your organization can modernize at scale without having to pause to solve foundational issues.

The Rs of Application Modernization

Having assessed your portfolio and identified the applications ripe for modernization, it's crucial to delineate the 'how' of the transformation process. 

There are several strategies for updating and enhancing your digital infrastructure. These methods are categorized based on their implementation complexity, balancing risk and impact on your existing systems.

The strategies range from straightforward adjustments that minimize disruption to more comprehensive overhauls that, while potentially introducing greater risk, offer significant improvements in functionality and performance.

Each approach offers unique benefits and considerations for your business. Go deeper into these strategies and learn how to choose the best path for your application's modernization journey by visiting our blog, The Rs of Application Modernization: 8 Proven Strategies for Success.

How StratusGrid Can Help With Your Application Modernization Process

As an AWS-certified partner, StratusGrid has more than 10 years of experience modernizing applications to be cloud-native. Our engineers can help with:

- Alignment and analysis

We identify your organization’s goals, the best ways to measure results, and a baseline to refer to before working on your AWS environment.

- Planning

We build a detailed and measurable action plan—as well as perform a risk assessment and identify migrations—to make improvements and ensure it aligns with your company goals. 

- Testing and execution

We test our assumptions and do pilots to help de-risk the project. Working alongside your team, we execute the plan while monitoring process changes as needed.

- Reviewing results

We complete a closing presentation to your main stakeholders so you understand and can measure the impact of our work together.

5 Benefits of AWS Cloud Modernization with StratusGrid

Among the many ways your company will benefit, here are five:

1. Delight your customers

AWS modernization helps improve your user experience by making your applications faster, more reliable, and more scalable. All of which is essential to remain competitive and meet the growing expectations of your customers.

2. Improve your security

By modernizing your environments, you can centralize your security operations, gain real-time visibility into your security posture, and respond to threats quickly and efficiently.

3. Shorten your deployment times

Innovate with faster iteration and tighter feedback loops by automating testing and deployment.

4. Reduce work in progress

Reduce the amount of manual work required to manage infrastructure and applications, so your team can focus on more strategic initiatives.

5. Achieve cost efficiencies

AWS cloud modernization helps you choose the pricing option and technical approach that best meets your needs. Only pay for the cloud services you need and allocate resources strategically to support your business goals.

Ready to Elevate Your Applications? Let's Talk Modernization

Embark on your application modernization journey with confidence and the expertise of StratusGrid by your side. As your trusted AWS-certified partner, we're committed to transforming your applications to be cloud-native, ensuring they're not just up-to-date but ahead of the curve.

Contact StratusGrid today for expert AWS modernization services.