Infra and App Modernisation Efforts

Key Takeaways

Thomas Van Laere is a certified Microsoft Azure consultant from Belgium. He helps businesses and organizations build strategies that result in lower capital and operating expenditures by utilizing the Microsoft Azure platform and open-source technologies. In May 2020, he was awarded the Azure Content Hero award by Microsoft for having created original content, sample code, or learning resources and documented and shared experiences and lessons to help others to build on the Azure cloud platform. Two years later, in 2022, he received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the Microsoft Azure category.

What is Infra and App modernization?

Infra and App modernization is when a business thinks, “We have this application that’s generating a lot of revenue for us, but we want to make it even better.” They see that their application has some deficiencies or points they can improve upon when thinking of using the Azure Cloud to modernize certain parts of the infrastructure or the application. And in doing so, it makes the result for the end user even better.

When do people go ahead with infra and app modernization?

There are a lot of different triggers for different companies. No journey to the cloud is the same. For instance, let’s take the COVID pandemic; you’ve had many companies almost switch to a remote working kind overnight. These are situations where you need additional computing power on demand. It is one of the main driving forces to start a migration to Azure. There can also be other reasons, for example, to deal with additional regulatory compliances. If you belong to the healthcare sector, you must consider data sovereignty before taking advantage of the Azure platform. For instance, you can set up a model where your data is still hosted in your on-premises data center, for example, in Belgium. You can run all the compute resources and do all the calculations in West Europe or France Azure.

Prerequisites for migration and modernization

There are a lot of people who might think that there are only technical requirements when you are dealing with this type of effort. But there is also a whole social aspect of it as well. While doing one of these migrations or modernizing your application, you should make sure that you have all the stakeholders to talk about what you want to do and what the result should be. Adopting an agile mindset can help when dealing with these types of efforts. Because nothing is ever set in stone with these types of things.

Benefits of Azure migration

We can divide the clients into three different categories, you have the clients who want to do the infrastructure migration to Azure, or you have the customers who want to modernize their apps via container technologies. Then there are the ones who want to use more Azure native things and use the platform as a service and serverless offerings. Cost is an excellent benefit in Azure. The pay-as-you-go system helps people planning to migrate to Azure as it paves the way for much more exploration. It is also beneficial for more significant organizations as they can select what they want and pay as they proceed rather than investing a lot for what they will not use.