Replatforming in 2020. What it means in a rapidly digitizing and uncertain time

August 19th, 2020 in  Blog

With business recovery in the balance, this Intelliware blog post offers a robust new definition of replatforming to inform your technology strategy and business recovery.

The pandemic of 2020 has changed our world in many ways, forcing every individual and organization to adapt its operations, ready or not. The digital transformation that began decades ago has, by 2020, reached an inflection point. Painfully aware of the frailty of our legacy infrastructure, the time to act is now. Every business big and small must adopt a digital-first model going forward.

How can decision-makers leverage both the technology they already have and adopt new innovative solutions?

On the surface, global organizations, especially in industries like financial services and healthcare, may seem digitally sophisticated and able to adapt easily. Look under the proverbial hood, as we have done professionally for 30 years now, and you might discover otherwise. We invariably encounter vastly complex IT ecosystems made of dozens, and often hundreds, of legacy systems, apps, and technologies at work.

This IT complexity stymies product/service innovation and continuous improvement efforts, burdening new projects with data integration requirements and delays, even before they get started. The complexity costs enterprises a small fortune. Organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in data integration and maintenance projects.

The making of a business quagmire

Ultimately, all that complexity translates into a less competitive organization, unable to keep up with more nimble enterprises that focus on delighting customers. Add the unprecedented market pressures and requirements created in a pandemic/post-pandemic reality, and you have the makings of a business quagmire.

Is it any wonder Forbes reports that over 80 percent of enterprise business operations leaders say data integration is critical to ongoing operations?

Fortunately, replatforming provides an intuitive solution for organizations who want to improve what they have, and integrate new technology solutions. Instead of trying to introduce new omnicompetent systems or relying on SaaS apps that may sidestep industry compliance regulations, replatforming provides organizations with an incremental and secure solution to improve the tools they already use and bring them up to modern standards.

Redefining replatforming

In our 2018 ebook, Intelliware offered this definition of replatforming: the process of renovating and migrating a legacy application to take advantage of modern technologies, environments, and architectures. Today, in 2020, we revisit our definition of the process of moving and improving applications to include taking advantage of resilient and secure technologies, environments, and architectures.

What’s changed? To start, the dispersed work model makes the individual employee more pivotal than ever. Every professional is also a consumer, accustomed to using phones, websites, and wearable devices. Our world of consumer electronics and digital experiences has become so sophisticated that we instantly recognize and resist outdated user experiences and clumsy interfaces.

Replatforming versus modernization

Replatforming provides a means to upgrade apps to a modern design and performance standard, without expecting individuals to learn entirely new systems.

In the backend, migrating an application provides an invaluable solution to eliminate a siloed data architecture in favour of a modern data infrastructure. All “new and improved” applications share secure and compliant access to data, and also benefit from unrivalled security and redundancy, complete with high availability and resilient services backed by legally binding service level agreements as the norm. Meaning, there’s no reason for any mission-critical application to go offline, ever.

Cloud service providers are quick to promise the world when it comes to the levels of security, residency, and compliance that they can offer when you migrate your data. However, most leave you to lift and shift applications without necessarily ensuring that you satisfy any of those requirements. Adhering to modern privacy and security standards throughout your replatforming initiative requires thoughtful planning and stewardship by experienced technical experts.

Resilience and security

Which gets us the to last part of our new and improved replatforming definition: taking advantage of resilient and secure technologies, environments, and architectures.

2020 has taught business owners and professionals a hard lesson. Few companies were ready to adapt to a remote/dispersed workforce. With an uncertain future, everyone must be better prepared.

To reach such a goal, employees need always-on, device-agnostic, remote access to every solution that enables them to be successful, productive, and safe. Any compromise can bring disruption and productivity loss, especially in a pandemic/post-pandemic world.

Cybercrime remains a pervasive problem in Canada, the US and around the world. Unfortunately, the pandemic has added fuel to the phishing fire, opening the door to opportunistic attacks on employees working remotely. As our economy transforms digitally, cybercrime increases. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Organizations big and small should follow security best practices to help protect their employees, their customers, and their data.

Transformative technologies

The technologies, environments, and architectures your organization can leverage have never been more powerful or worth pursuing. Our unique replatforming approach allows your organization to leverage its legacy systems as we build you a new scalable, adaptable digital foundation.

Transformative solutions, like Machine Learning and the Internet of Things, enable organizations to innovate and differentiate their products and services. With replatforming, organizations can free themselves from complexity and refocus their attention to innovation and prosperity.

What do you think of our replatforming definition? Are you ready to move and improve your applications? Book a call with an Intelliware delivery specialist today.