Legacy on-prem infrastructure is becoming unsustainable and expensive to operate and maintain in a cloud-native world. They comprise a significant chunk of IT Operations costs. Still, many established businesses still rely on antiquated IT infrastructure while struggling to meet the agile experience demands of the end customer. The problem is that leaders in business and information technology are frequently faced with a dilemma – update outdated systems and disrupt their existing operations or continue with incremental changes.

But do they have to really compromise between transformation and risk mitigation? That’s where infrastructure modernization comes in. It’s the process of transforming the servers, storage and network, while rationalizing the infrastructural footprint. This is achieved through automation while migrating to new and improved cloud native systems instead of maintaining routine, on-prem datacenters.

In this blog, we discuss the 10 aspects of infra modernization.

Modernize Infra on the Cloud: What’s in it?

It makes more sense for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure to achieve long-term business benefits. Shorter time to market, ease of maintenance, reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness are among the many. Along with that, Cloud and DevOps innovations help provide infrastructure more dynamically and in a distributed manner. In addition, modernizing your infrastructure on the Cloud:

• Increases the scalability, dependability
• Improves the availability and capacity
• Enhances efficiency, administration, tracking, and accessibility
• Fixes problems caused by existing infrastructure
• Reduces expenses, cuts TCO and boosts income
• Helps with modernizing business applications

Three Pillars of Modernization Initiatives and their Benefits

Platform Modernization

The benefits of cloud-based modernization of legacy platforms include increased speed to market, greater scalability, and more responsiveness to changing business needs. This shift includes efficient workload management and a more robust technical foundation for your business. Modernized cloud-based platforms make everything easier from controlling root systems to building applications, integrating advanced technologies, and releasing the same to customers.

Data Modernization

With the advent of big data, digital native enterprises are gaining an edge over their less nimble competitors. Consolidating disparate data sources and moving legacy systems to the cloud is crucial in the face of this existential danger. It empowers enterprises with actionable insights drive process automation and customer experiences improvement initiatives.

Application Modernization

Legacy applications must evolve to meet the rapidly changing demands of the digital world. It’s a chicken and egg problem, without infrastructure modernization, companies won’t be able to modernize their applications.

The 10 Aspects of Infra Modernization on Cloud

1. Evaluate Current IT Infrastructure Landscape
   Conduct a rigorous assessment of your company's current tech assets. What kind of technology is helping your company thrive? What isn't? Where do we start making improvements? Do you think outsourcing anything would be a good idea?

   Find out what problems, needs, and difficulties your business faces. To succeed in your modernization endeavors, you must establish specific goals and objectives for your firm.

   Even while it's likely that your ideal IT infrastructure will evolve over the next 5–10 years, it's still important to define the parameters. Your new infrastructure should be built around your business's projected needs, and you should use open protocols and standards. That way, not only will your new infrastructure be adaptable, but it will also be easy to modify and update. Think about the ways in which you may take advantage of upcoming shifts or refresh cycles to jumpstart the modernization process.

2. Infrastructure Modernization on Cloud
   Adopting cloud computing is crucial to the success of modernization. By utilizing the cloud's resources, businesses may easily extend their operations, boost their customer base, and save money. Organizations that want to undergo digital transformation and take advantage of growth potential through updated infrastructure will find cloud migration essential. To migrate your business to the cloud and modernize its underlying infrastructure, its essential to concentrate on the needs of the company and its goals.

3. Optimize Business with Automation, Orchestration and Analytics
   By incorporating more automation, orchestration, and analytics services into your infrastructure, you can boost your technology stack's performance, efficiency, agility, and scalability while enhancing your business's visibility and control.

4. Split Up your System's Monolithic Design
   Separate the monolithic system into smaller, more manageable services. You can only accomplish that by finding out what's inside.

   Split the microservices into its parts. This includes web servers, APIs, storage, and networking. Transform existing microservices into a domain-driven architecture. Get to the damaged parts and see how they'll fit into the plans for the future of service provision. It is recommended to divide the infrastructure into further parts if a single part includes more than 10% of the application stack. While moving from a monolithic to a microservices architecture, it is crucial to evaluate the dependencies and priorities involved in the conversion.

   The next step is to turn the services from the baseline components into Microservices. Microservices are independent, lightweight applications that run independently and communicate with one another. As a result of their focus on business functionality, these services are small pieces of code that specialize in a specific task. As they are all lightweight virtualized apps shipped in containers, these services can be installed separately. This is a great place to start for those transitioning to cloud-native.

5. Separate your Applications From your Infrastructure
   To ensure a smooth transition to a cloud-based infrastructure, businesses should analyze and rank the platform needs of their most essential apps. By partitioning large applications into more manageable chunks, businesses may use automation and Infra as a Code frameworks to rapidly deploy and establish environments for development, testing, and operations. This way, both the time and money spent on developing a product can be reduced.

   In addition, the costs associated with running applications and maintaining the underlying infrastructure can be minimized. You get to select the most suitable cloud based on scalability, dependability, and application deployment patterns.

6. Set your Apps Free with Microservices
   These services should be decoupled from their current infrastructure and application stack as part of the application and infrastructure modernization process. Developing infrastructure-independent microservices frees us from using a certain vendor's platform to launch our services. Focus exclusively on containers as you undertake the upgrading process. Ultimately, it will assist you in synchronizing with the hybrid cloud adoption.

7. Modernizing Applications with Security in Mind
   No doubt, the process of updating an organization's IT infrastructure takes a lot of work. However, when executed properly, it can significantly improve your business's ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions and meet your firm's and customers' needs. But there is still one unaddressed elephant in the room.

   However, most companies often neglect fundamentals like security and compliance in the name of progress. There has been a significant increase in high-profile security and data breaches along with a slew of related regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It is more crucial than ever for your business to take preventative measures by integrating robust security and compliance measures into IT architecture.

8. Bringing DevOps into the Mix
   DevOps is concerned with how quickly an application can be released. DevOps closes the gap between manual intervention and automated deployments by automating the release and delivery process.

   Applications can be launched at any moment using infrastructure provisioning and configuration tools and the seamless integration of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, allowing for on-demand application deployment and infrastructure provisioning. Your modernization process will benefit from faster deployment, fewer failures, and quicker recoveries by incorporating DevOps.

   The creation and management of the operations environment will become less hassle if DevOps is integrated into standard operating procedures. The benefits go beyond conventional infrastructure automation. Integrating DevOps will make it easier to avoid bugs, recover from errors, and rebuild across numerous servers.

9. Built-in Safeguards: DevSecOps
   Putting security measures in place is typically seen as a post-deployment task, which can lead to tension between the DevOps and Security Teams and slow down the development cycle. The best way to prevent this is to incorporate security measures into the application development process. DevSecOps must be implemented across the company to realize this goal.

   DevSecOps is an IT industry cultural shift that incorporates security into the DevOps culture and the entire fast development cycle, from design to testing to deployment.

10. DevSecOps and Infrastructure as Code: A Dynamic duo
    Integrating DevOps, Security, and Compliance into Infrastructure Management is much easier with Infrastructure as Code. IaC can be used to automate your infrastructure and bring your outdated systems up to date, but it also raises serious security concerns. Security for IaC is now widely recognized as a top priority in the DevSecOps ecosystem.

    This is why aspects like data encryption, network segmentation, access control requirements, log collection and retention are a part of IaC template files, incorporated as best practices and compliance requirements.

Modernize your Mission-critical IT Infra on cloud with Cloud4C

The demand for enhanced CX and faster time to market are at their peak in the digital era. This ultimately implies improving operational efficiency and reducing costs. That is why modernizing infrastructure is crucial.

Organizations need to make a formal strategy outlining what adjustments need to be done and by when. If you want your modernization effort to go well, you need a partner that can assist with everything from planning your new infrastructure to researching and implementing the most appropriate technologies for your company. At Cloud4C, being one of the world’s leading application-focused Cloud MSPs, we specialize in migrating, modernizing, managing mission-critical enterprise IT infra on any cloud of choice. Best of all, we guarantee the transformation within weeks at up to 99.95% uptime till application level. Our experts have assisted thousands of organizations along their digital transformation and modernization journey’s. Here’s more on our automation-driven, intelligent infra modernization offerings.