Modernise Your Data, Applications, Cloud — And Your Organisation

To unlock all the benefits of the cloud — faster time to market, agility, scale and optimised economics — continuous modernisation must be part of a holistic digital transformation.   

That’s because digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about business processes and organisation. Aligning those processes to your goals — such as delivering new products and services faster and superior customer experiences — is foundational to leading in this everything-as-a-service era.  ​ 

It also means getting the right data to the right applications at the right business moment. Optimising applications means fitting the infrastructure to what the application needs, not the other way around. Similarly, deploying your applications and data sources to the right cloud enables better agility, performance, and economics. ​ 

​By modernising applications, data, cloud and organisation, your business can not only accelerate the delivery of new products, services and experiences, it will also increase business agility — the ability to rapidly adjust to evolving (or radically changing) business circumstances.  With the speed of business accelerating along with customer demands, an agile infrastructure and application strategy is imperative. 

Myriad goals, successful outcomes 

Organisations come to understand the necessity of modernisation for many reasons, but the benefits are uniformly undeniable.   

For Delmar International, a global transportation and logistics company, strong international growth through acquisitions was hampered by aging data center infrastructure, degraded application performance and the challenges of integrating all the existing infrastructure from those acquired companies.   

Traditionally, the company owned all its IT infrastructure. The downside to that, of course, is spending time on infrastructure and not laser focused on the business along with a lack of scalability and agility. After getting buy-in from company leaders, CTO Ron McIntyre moved a single application to public cloud. Reports that were timing out after 1,200 seconds were suddenly being completed in 12 seconds.  

It was a light bulb moment for McIntyre, who moved to develop a comprehensive strategy to modernise, integrate and optimise Delmar’s entire technology stack from applications to infrastructure.  

​[Read more: "Process First, Technology Second”: Delmar Partners with Rackspace for Application Modernisation] 

For Boozt, a Nordic multi-brand ecommerce site that attracts more than five million visitors a month, the goal was to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance customer experiences and drive growth. But first, it needed to make sure it’s infrastructure could cope with the increased traffic those technologies would bring. A move to public cloud was the first step, but then Boozt leaders needed to make a decision: go out and hire and build what it needed or find a partner who had done it before.   

The company chose Rackspace, which helped them maximize their chosen cloud platform and integrate cutting edge data analytic, machine learning and AI. Already, Boozt has seen a 50 percent increase in click-throughs on recommended items, thanks to better use of relevant customer data.  

[Read more: Helping Boozt Maximize the Results of Increased Customer Demand]  

Overcoming the challenges of modernisation 

These successes are undeniable, but the challenges faced are common with many organisations. Traditional IT structures, siloed and proprietary applications, outdated processes and resource-intensive operations can all slow the pace of modernisation.    

Deeply embedded traditional applications and infrastructure are a major roadblock, as these were designed to automate now out-of-date business processes using inflexible technology stacks. ​ 

Even the very first step — understanding current business and IT processes, in order to re-align or redesign them to drive superior customer experiences, accelerating new products and services — can be a roadblock, as this work requires bandwidth your business and IT teams may not possess. Yet this step is critical to leading in an everything-as-a-service world.  

That’s where an expert partner can help. Given the complexity of today’s IT landscape, it almost never makes sense to go it alone. But how do you assess potential partners’ capabilities? 

Be on the lookout for companies that understand modernisation is not as a one and done activity but should be considered a continuous process. The right partner should also be able to:  

• guide you through the early work of establishing the right business processes and systems to support agile execution;   
• look beyond the current organisation to build out a talent pool able to scale and support the organisation’s digital initiatives through a new ecosystem;
• anticipate and implement innovation quickly, with the right vision of what modern applications can be and understanding different cloud models;
• customise, modernise and migrate existing applications to integrate and scale with the latest technologies and meet the demands of the business and 
• re-balance the operating model to optimise applications and infrastructure and reduce costs.​ 

Continuous modernisation requires that organisations take a comprehensive view of their application and infrastructure environment. It is thinking beyond just applications and infrastructure and expanding to consider how applications impact and are impacted by business processes, new and rapidly changing data, a DevOps culture and tools, cloud infrastructure, continuity and deployment options.