Cloud modernization: The critical step your migration may be missing

The public cloud turns 23 this year, and enterprise migration of on-premises workloads isn’t just continuing — it’s speeding up. According to the Foundry Cloud Computing Study 2024, 63% of enterprise CIOs were accelerating their cloud migrations, up from 57% in 2023.

When organizations migrate applications to the cloud, they expect to see significant benefits: increased scalability, stronger security and accelerated adoption of new technologies. But CIOs have significant, well-founded concerns around costs. Specifically, CIOs worry about controlling costs (51%) and how much costs will add up in the long term (49%), according to the Foundry study.

Much of that concern may be rooted in the conventional wisdom that migrating to the cloud does not cut costs. Which can be true if your efforts end with migration. Certainly, no CIO would try to migrate a mainframe or a traditional monolithic application directly to the cloud. But a VM or a containerized application also isn’t going to provide the full benefits of the cloud without modernization. As AWS points out on the company’s blog, “On-premises applications aren’t commonly designed to take advantage of the capabilities that the cloud offers, such as elasticity, resiliency, automation, and such.”

What’s the solution? Modernization.

“From the standpoint of the cloud, a containerized or virtualized application is usually still a monolith,” said Matt Leising, managing director of engineering at Solution Design Group (SDG). “You need to break that application down into its parts, because some parts are utilized more than others. Once you break it apart into a collection of services, with cloud capabilities, you can allocate fewer CPU and storage resources to those services that aren’t used often to bring those costs down.”

By rearchitecting applications so each component functions as a separate, but connected service, organizations can avoid paying for unnecessary cloud resources. In fact, if infrequently used services are deployed in a serverless cloud environment, the cloud will only allocate CPU to them when they need to run, which can significantly cut costs.

Cost savings are far from the only advantage of modernization, however. Modernization can also enable enterprises to cost-effectively scale applications as their businesses grow. As AWS writes, by refactoring an application, a coder’s aim is to “modify its architecture by taking full advantage of cloud-native features to improve agility, performance, and scalability. This is driven by strong business demand to scale, accelerate product and feature releases, and to reduce costs.”

“We had a customer that migrated a large application to the cloud without modernizing,” Leising said, “resulting in the need for an enormous amount of compute resources. To scale the application to their other regions, they would have had to buy the same amount of compute capacity for each region, which would have been far too expensive. We helped them modernize the application, enabling them to scale efficiently and cost-effectively.”

In another case, SDG partnered with Cargill to modernize an agricultural commodities trading platform for the cloud. The results are a good example of the benefits of modernization, including:  

• Cost reduction: Reduced administrative costs through improved infrastructure and processes.
• Improved user experience: A modern, mobile-friendly interface increased usability and reduced errors for users.
• Greater business agility: The AWS cloud-hybrid platform allows Cargill to rapidly build and deploy new capabilities as user needs evolve.
• Scalable performance: The platform can handle high-volume, globally distributed transactions while maintaining flexibility and adaptability.

SDG is an employee-owned business and technology company with deep expertise in cloud migration, application modernization, and DevOps automation. Learn how SDG can help maximize your organization’s investment in the cloud.