Today’s businesses must adapt to rapidly changing market conditions, manage and derive insights from massive volumes of data, and meet the rising demands of today’s always-on customers. In short, they must modernize—rethinking processes and leveraging technology to seize opportunities earlier, derive maximum value from their investments, and innovate faster than ever before.
The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic further drive these changes. Businesses across all industries must now move even faster to embrace new work styles and drive down costs. Recent research suggests that more than 90 percent of enterprises are accelerating cloud adoption plans because of COVID-19.
Understanding the two stages of digital modernization
No two modernization projects are the same. In helping thousands
of organizations successfully reach their business outcomes, AWS
identified two distinct modernization stages.
Many of our customers have found it beneficial to break the larger
digital transformation effort into these two stages: IT modernization
and application modernization
- IT modernization involves transforming legacy systems, processes, workloads, and infrastructure as you migrate to the cloud. This stage will be the primary focus of this eBook.
- Application modernization leverages cloud-native systems and services to drive a new iterative, intelligent, and agile way of harnessing data and developing applications.
Driving modernization through migration
Moving data to AWS opens opportunities to rethink how you build and deliver
software. Your move to AWS should include planning for transitioning people
skills to AWS Cloud Operations and DevOps. Re-platforming and refactoring
applications is your opportunity to drive change and efficiencies in your business.
As you get comfortable with cloud operating models, you can begin to replatform and refactor applications to experiment with efficiencies, leverage more open-source technologies, and shift operating models away from waterfall
to DevOps. These tasks and others comprise the second stage of digital
transformation: application modernization.
