Keeping Up With the Cloud: What Companies Can Learn From Amazon’s Leadership Shift

As the pandemic puts pressure on businesses to shift toward more distributed networks permanently, the race for a resilient, cloud-first strategy is apparent in all industries. In this article, Brandon Edenfield, managing director of application modernization, Advanced, addresses how organizations can streamline and optimize their modernization processes and avoid common pitfalls throughout their cloud journey.

Jeff Bezos announced he’s stepping down as Amazon CEO and passing the torch to AWS leader Andy Jassy beginning in Q3 2021, marking one of the most important changes in global business leadership. This monumental moment is a huge shift not just for Amazon’s business structure but for all companies, large and small. As the pandemic puts pressure on businesses to shift toward more distributed networks on a permanent basis and forces those with aging technologies into disaster, the race for a resilient, cloud-first strategy is apparent in all industries. 

As the global demand for the benefits associated with cloud services grows, it’s vital that organizations make a move away from their legacy systems and embrace these new environments. But as every company’s businesses and systems are unique, how can they identify the best strategies for success in their modernizations?

A Cloud-First Approach

Amazon’s leadership announcement is just the tip of the iceberg for a multi-industry shift toward the mass prioritization of shifting legacy systems and applications away from mainframes and into the cloud. Many companies and a majority of government agencies all over the world still operate legacy mainframe systems, storing their data on archaic platforms that are prone to outages and challenges. 

Following outages seen by states like New Jersey and California, today’s business ecosystem proves that cloud capabilities are no longer “nice to have” — they’re critical to business function and survival. Incorporating a cloud-first approach allows for unmatched scalability and operational cost reductions that can make or break a company’s bottom line in the long run. What’s more, shifting technologies to the cloud also provides the positive environmental impact that modern customers and business partners demand, as storing applications in these environments requires significantly less energy to operate, thus eliminating their associated greenhouse gas Opens a new window emissions.

Learn More: Using Colocation to Reduce the Complexity of Hybrid Cloud Adoption

The Dangers of Procrastination

Operating on and maintaining a system within a mainframe usually eats up a large portion of an organization’s total IT budget, leaving little room for flexibility with new IT initiatives as business grows down the line. Investing in the cloud when your business is running smoothly is incredibly important. After all, while it’s easy to ignore critical IT updates when there are bigger immediate concerns, treading this fine line of inefficient operation can force a company into compromising positions when disasters strike. 

Just look at what happened to New Jersey and CaliforniaOpens a new window during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. State unemployment offices were suddenly overwhelmed with the volume of requests coming in, and the outdated code on their mainframes couldn’t keep up with demand. The people who counted on these services were ultimately the ones who suffered because of this IT failure. If these agencies had prioritized modernization during the years without a crisis, disaster could have been avoided. 

Organizations can’t afford to further delay getting away from their mainframes by waiting until the next crisis forces change, but taking the first steps can sometimes be overwhelming and confusing. Streamlining and optimizing the cloud modernization processes begins with understanding the best approach for your organization. For companies that recognize there is little time left to wait to begin their modernization journeys, here are some of the best strategies for starting out: 

• If organizations need a solid solution to cloud adoption, automated refactoring is a good place to start. This approach is when IT pros use customized, automated tools to transform the existing code of a system into modern languages that enable organizations to better adapt to emerging business demands. This streamlining helps organizations to become capable of completing everyday tasks with significantly more ease. If this isn’t the best-fit approach, another option that’s available for companies that have some extra time and budget on their hands is to pursue a full rewriting strategy. Although it may require a significantly higher financial investment than other options and provide significantly more risk in terms of chances of overall success, completely refreshing a legacy system also has its benefits. Creating a new cloud environment from scratch can allow companies to customize what they want from their system without limitations, which some may view as worth the risks of this approach. 
• When time is of the essence, rehosting or system replacement are options that companies should consider. With rehosting, existing code is given a new home in the cloud so that the constraints of the mainframe are no longer holding back the organization, and business functions can be better suited for a fast-paced environment. For businesses that need to ensure seamless transitions and little interruption to their customer services, this makes rehosting an appealing option. However, replacing a legacy system with third-party vendors and new software through the system replacement method can also achieve this. The caveat is that companies need to consider if they are willing to sacrifice custom capabilities for speediness if they choose to go with system replacement and ensure that their third-party solution is a fit for their company’s specific needs.
  

Learn More: Why CIOs Shouldn’t Race to Move all Data to the Public Cloud

As increasing numbers of companies follow in Amazon’s footsteps and prioritize cloud operations, companies in every industry need to keep up and move away from their legacy systems before their competitors get ahead of them. Setting a realistic timeline for modernization and taking a phased approach to prioritize improving mission-critical functions first is the key to a successful transition. Keeping up with the cloud in today’s changing business environment will be a huge priority for all companies worldwide as we reassess our relationship to mainframe systems. 

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