Which digital transformation strategy is most effective for the organization? Time is of the essence when it comes to answering this question.Which digital transformation strategy is most effective for the organization? Time is of the essence when it comes to answering this question as fierce competition is driving many organizations to strategically move their applications to the cloud. It is now clearer than ever that proper execution of effective application modernization strategy is mandatory for the very survival of the organization, as more than 20% of Fortune 500 companies have either vanished or diminished in the last 20 years, while giving way to competition with better digital solutions. It is fairly easy to see the modernization trend in industries such as banking, insurance and healthcare, but even industries like fashion are not immune to this, as digital newcomers with online shops make traditional stores go bankrupt. Realizing what is at stake, the answer for such a profound strategic question must begin with careful examination of the true motivations for application transformation.An effective strategy can be found when exploring the motivations for moving to the cloud - UX and scalabilityIn a world of modern applications, UX is kingOne of the main motivations for developing cloud technology was providing a seamless high-quality user experience across multiple devices and form factors. Original concept was based on SaaS or PaaS platforms, but as part one of this article series depicts, some organizations have compromised on IaaS and mere virtual machines in the cloud. As explained there, not only that it does not improve UX, it can actually make the application less responsive. Aging VB6, PowerBuilder, VB.NET, C# or Java desktop applications provide exactly the same UX or even worse, when moved to the cloud without proper application modernization, hence not meeting the requirement of this basic motivation. Adequate UX can only be provided when these apps are transformed to natively fit modern cloud platforms, such as ones with ASP.NET MVC or Spring on server-side and Angular on client-side. These modern platforms are very much alive and keep evolving unlike Visual Basic or C Sharp ones, and can therefore support a strategic modernization roadmap that will keep the organization up to date with latest technologies.It is important to realize that proper UX is not a luxury these days nor is it relevant only for customer-facing apps. Partners working with the organization, third parties, freelancers and the employees themselves have all got used to high-quality UX based on their experience with mobile devices. What was considered a high-end UX not a while ago is now trivial, and aging desktop apps are way off in this regard. Just ask your IT managers how many complaints they get about this on a daily basis; once they are done venting you'll get the picture right away. The lift and shift strategy mentioned in previous post, which is promoted by cloud giants like Amazon and Google, cannot solve this issue as it perpetuates the existing UX and introduces additional latency. On the other hand, desktop apps that are transformed into well architected web applications provide a modern UX by design, and can therefore fulfill one of the main motivations that made the organization consider moving them to the cloud in the first place.Multi-device, multi-user, multi-tenant and scalabilityAnother main motivation for moving applications to the cloud is sharing the application and the data it manages by multiple users, while keeping all information up to date in real-time. In many organizations like banks and HMOs, it is even shared by both customers and employees, only with different UIs, different privileges etc. Monolithic desktop apps, whether local ones or in a cloud VM, were not originally designed for this, and only well architected web applications can provide such features. Truly modernized applications, such as ones built for Spring servers or Angular clients, were designed to support different types of devices, both mobile and desktop ones. They can also be operated by multiple users simultaneously, each with their own UI and privileges, while remaining responsive and keeping data up to date in real-time.Another very important motivation is the scalability offered by modern cloud platforms. One of the main reasons why monolithic desktop applications cannot properly support this is that they were designed with single user in mind rather than multi-user and multi-tenant. Furthermore, these apps were not built for stateless sessions, which is a fundamental requirement of modern cloud apps for native dynamic load balancing in the cloud. Only when reengineering the desktop app through application transformation into a well architected web application, can its modernized version behave as a stateless application and support this main motivation for moving it to the cloud.Native scale up and scale down is only possible when applications are modernized and support stateless sessionsExperimenting with the new strategyEven before application transformation is a go, it is already possible to experiment with this strategy and ensure it fits the needs of the organization. This can clear a lot of the fog and also prevent an "all or nothing" situation that might postpone decision making and thus play to the hands of competition. Luckily, it is possible to download a free analysis tool that can run on the legacy code and provide time and cost estimation for the modernization process. This tool is part of a toolbox that simplifies and automates application transformation and turns a well defined digital transformation strategy into a reality.
