When you’re tangled up in legacy IT, new Cloud platforms and an increasingly hybrid environment, simply maintaining secure, stable infrastructure can be seen as a win. As a result transformation and innovation can be overlooked, even though it is where the real long-term value lies.
If your IT teams are spending most of their time maintaining and troubleshooting existing systems, you’re missing the huge opportunity to develop digital tools that win new business, capture new markets, drive revenue and cut costs.
Find the sweet spot between TODAY and TOMORROW
Modernising your technology and operating models to streamline maintenance can shift the balance and free up your developers to work on strategic innovations. An approach that separates ‘maintenance’ from ‘innovation’ can deliver maximum ROI and minimum disruption.
Rather than aiming to transform everything, we recommend that clients to assess their existing tech stack and make one of three decisions for each application:
Retire or migrate: Make a plan to shut down obsolete applications or move them to an off-the-shelf cloud solution.
Minimise maintenance: Non-core, yet essential, legacy software can be retained with modern workflows to keep them ticking over.
Invest and accelerate: Apps that are core to your business growth, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage should be enhanced to become a strength.
Steps one and two can benefit from a shift to cloud architecture and modern platforms to streamline workflows and minimise maintenance time and costs. The goal is to get as close to set and forget as possible so they don’t become a bottleneck to innovation.
Beyond operational efficiency, the major ROI comes from step three where you can invest your talent and budget into modernising core apps, deploying new features and realising the next big idea.
Accelerate new product development and digital transformation
At the start of a digital transformation project, it can be helpful to look at the challenge through three lenses:
Architecture: Build a solid foundation
This stage is all about creating a modern IT operating model that is designed to meet business strategy. Specific actions include:
- Designing scalable Cloud architecture: In today’s dynamic digital landscape, constructing a scalable Cloud architecture ensures that your IT foundation can handle growth and change without compromising performance.
- Technology roadmap planning: By developing a clear technology roadmap, organisations can chart a course for their IT evolution, ensuring alignment with long-term business goals.
- Software delivery maturity assessments: Assessing the maturity of your software delivery processes can pinpoint areas for improvement, ensuring you’re using the most efficient methods to bring products to market.
- DevOps assessment and enhancement: An in-depth evaluation of your DevOps practices can reveal opportunities to streamline development and operations, fostering a more collaborative and agile environment.
- Cost and performance optimisation: Regularly optimising for cost and performance ensures that your IT infrastructure delivers maximum value while remaining cost-effective.
Platform operations: Streamline maintenance
This is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organisations in the cloud-native era. Specific activities include:
- DevOps accelerators and blueprints: Utilising DevOps accelerators and blueprints can speed up the development process, providing teams with tried-and-true patterns for success.
- Infrastructure as code: Adopting an infrastructure-as-code approach allows IT teams to automate and replicate environments quickly, ensuring consistency and reducing manual errors.
- CI / CD modernisation: Modernising Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines ensures that software updates are delivered smoothly and efficiently to end-users.
- Logging, monitoring, alerting, and reporting: A robust system for logging, monitoring, and alerting is crucial for maintaining platform health, ensuring any issues are rapidly identified and addressed.
- Setting up platform and DevOps metrics: By establishing clear metrics, teams can measure the effectiveness of their platforms and DevOps practices, driving continuous improvement.
Having a sustainable cloud platform unlocks benefits like agility, resiliency, automation, analytics and scalability.
Modernisation: New product development and support
Building on a robust low-maintenance platform, your IT teams can create innovative technology products that differentiate your business, equip you to adapt to market needs and become a revenue generator. With a solid architecture and platform to build on, your in-house or external development teams can efficiently manage and modernise your application portfolio. Specific actions include:
- Existing application enhancements: Regularly enhancing existing applications ensures they remain relevant, meet user needs, and take advantage of the latest technological advances.
- New application development: Creating new applications using modern frameworks like .Net, Java, and JS allows businesses to cater to evolving market demands and stay competitive.
- Application optimisation and support: Continuously optimising and supporting applications ensures they perform at their best, delivering a seamless user experience.
- Cloud-native application development: Embracing Cloud-native development practices allows for the creation of resilient, scalable, and agile applications that leverage the full power of the Cloud.
- New product ideation and design: Regular ideation and design sessions can lead to innovative new products, ensuring your business remains at the forefront of market trends and meets emerging customer needs.
Case study: Acceleration in action
Nexon partnered with a leading legal services client that had developed a proprietary workflow automation system and self-service customer portal that was core to their business.
Running on an on-premise legacy infrastructure, the platform was becoming costly to maintain and complex to innovate and scale. Using our Accelerate modernisation model, we worked with the client to separate maintenance from innovation.
It was found that 80% of the functionality could be delivered more efficiently with an off-the-shelf SaaS solution.
Released from the burden of maintaining and supporting their core platform, the internal team was free to focus on innovating and developing the 20% of functionality that was specific and important to the business.
Effective modernisation streamlines and automates your existing platforms so you can focus on accelerating the creation of new value-driven products.
Glenn Mason is General Manager of Cloud Technology and Platforms at Nexon Asia Pacific.
For a no-obligation discussion about our solutions, contact Nexon today.
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