Azure Modernization Is The Key To Improve Productivity

What’s the center of any successful cloud migration? Of course, it is the technology used behind a successful migration that can help you with innovative transformation in the cloud. The strength of Microsoft when comes together in the form of Azure cloud delivers agile, scalable, and secure solutions that cover all the aspects of App Modernization. Let’s begin your journey towards Cloud Application Modernization with this blog covering everything about Azure App Modernization and the process inhibited to achieve it.

What is Azure App Modernization?

One of the most popular ways for modernization is through Microsoft Azure which has grown Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud Business 17% to USD 13.4 billion. App Modernization simply refers to the transformation of legacy app features by upgrading the old software practices to newer approaches, including newer languages, platforms, frameworks, and infrastructure.

Some of the tools of Microsoft Azure that helps in App Modernization include Azure Web Apps, Azure Mobile Apps, Azure Functions, WebJobs, Azure Containers, and so on. Azure provides enterprise-ready solutions with .NET to allow organizations to leverage existing knowledge.

5 Reasons to modernize with Azure

Here are the top 5 reasons why to modernize applications with Microsoft Azure:

• Faster time-to-market:Azure supports serverless architecture, containers, and microservices which creates small easy-to-deploy components which enhance the agility, flexibility, and scalability, thereby increasing the faster time-to-market of new updates.
• Enhanced Decision making: Legacy cloud application modernization with Azure has provided higher efficiency and intelligence to the systems such that different teams can have the access to data in some seconds, empowering better decision-making capabilities to both the business and the end-user
• Scaling Resources on-demand: Azure has created capabilities of increasing or decreasing resource usage as per the requirement of the customer. Additional resources can be allocated to systems on-demand in seconds without any disruption and optimizing the operations.
• Pay only for what you use:Azure enables the customers to pay only for the resources which have been used, thereby reducing the hardware and maintenance costs. This improves the cost management for the customers.
• High Security:Security play the most crucial part in legacy app modernization and hence, Azure provides efficient security protocols against any threat or attack. It also keeps on updating its security measures from time to time. 

Step-by-Step Guide towards Azure Modernization

App modernization is a continuous integrated process involving skills, people, and technology. There are 3 steps for cloud application modernization through Microsoft Azure. Let's deep dive into its process.

• 1.Planning
• 2.Implementation
• 3.Operations

Planning

Planning is the initial process that involves defining your strategy according to your organization’s needs, aligning stakeholders, and assessing infrastructure. This covers the following steps:

• Understanding the requirements of app modernization such as increasing agility, reducing cost, etc, and documenting the outcomes.
• Creating a team made up of stakeholders of IT, finance, and business.
• Finding out the service provider that fits into our business requirements and reduces risk.
• Getting insights about your existing on-premise environment and assessing apps, databases, and infrastructure.
• Calculating and comparing the total cost of ownership of Azure versus on-premise.
• Building a holistic plan for migration and modernization.

Implementation

Implementation is the most crucial process which involves an iterative approach for building landing zones for your legacy applications. Then, migrating and modernizing your applications on the Microsoft Azure cloud. This covers the following steps:

• Training IT and app development teams to learn new skills in cloud technologies.
• Preconfigure the landing zones including networking, security, management, and governance.
• Validate the landing zones with Azure readiness practices.
• Using Azure Migrate to migrate your legacy apps.
• Iteratively migrate small components at a single time to meet production needs. Use specific tools of Azure such as VMware migration, SQL Server migration, and global market support.
• Finally, modernizing your apps migrated by refactoring, rearchitecting, and rebuilding them. Modernization helps to achieve benefits such as boosting app innovation, accelerating developer velocity, and increasing agility. The modernization stage can be incorporated at any stage, i.e., before, during, or after the migration of data.
• Refactoring involves making minimal changes to the apps to increase speed and productivity. This can be done by using Azure Database Migration Service by provisioning an Azure SQL managed instance for the application. Next set up a new Azure DevOps project. Configure the connections for the web app and SQL instance to communicate. Finally, create build and deploy pipelines in Azure DevOps to create the modernized application.
• Rearchitecting involves modifying app functionality for achieving scalability. This involves breaking down clusters of monolithic legacy applications into small groups of microservices. This could be done to allow all the microservices of the app to work in parallel and scale easily according to the requirements. This step is involved when you need to apply innovative DevOps services, scale according to the needs, and reduce the use of VMs.
• Rebuilding your apps to increase their lifespan with Azure Functions. Updations of your applications to an app need to be rapid enough to meet the market requirements. With Azure Functions, AI, SQL managed instances, Azure DevOps, etc. updates take place quickly. Usage of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and Docker containers have made it faster for pushing updates to the registry.

Operations

Operations form the last step of managing, governing, and securing the legacy apps transformed to the cloud. This covers the following steps:

• Securing your infrastructure with Azure Sentinel.
• Updating and building the landing zone work on time.
• Optimization of cost for your cloud environment.
• Managing and monitoring workload for timely backup and disaster recovery.

Conclusion

Azure App Modernization and DevOps agility has transformed the ability to engage with customers in a more agile way and has optimized their operational processes, thus, increasing the overall performance of the application significantly. The step-by-step procedure provided helps you to modernize your legacy applications in a most simplified manner.

Seek help from our front desk team at info@csharptek.com or call on 18008902630 regarding migrating your legacy applications to Azure cloud in some simple and quick steps.