Cloud adoption for agility and competitiveness

Several organizations rely on monolithic applications developed 10-20 years ago using outdated technologies, causing security and compliance issues. In addition to that, these legacy applications and architectures restrict the businesses from scaling, impair agility and cause customer experience issues.

As technology organizations embark on the cloud transformation journey, different paths could be pursued with varying timelines of implementation and TCO. These range from re-hosting (aka lift-and-shift), re-platforming, re-factoring to take advantage of containers and re-writing using cloud-native technologies. For example, re-host is the quickest and cheapest way of cloud adoption with very high TCO. On the other hand, cloud re-write is the most expensive and time-consuming option for implementation, delivering the most benefits of cloud, including the lowest TCO — other options like re-factor and re-platform fall in between. 

There are costs and benefits to going cloud platform-specific vs. staying cloud-agnostic as well.

Choosing the right path is not a trivial task with near-term and long-term implications. Cloud workload assessment and analysis are critical steps to decide on the right path to cloud, considering the future business and technical requirements.

Iris follows a need-centric approach to define your transformation journey to meet your business objectives. Our cloud consultants assess the current tech stack and business requirements to create a cloud adoption roadmap with minimal risk. Our cloud services include:

• Portfolio assessment and consulting
• Replatforming workloads to cloud
• Re-factoring workloads to cloud
• Re-writing applications using cloud-native technologies and services

While portfolio assessment and consulting are done at a portfolio level, other services like re-platform, re-factor, and re-write are performed at the application level.

One of the crucial reasons for customers to adopt cloud is taking advantage of some Non- Functional Requirements (NFR) like business agility, resiliency, scalability, TCO reduction and others. Achieving these on cloud is significantly easier using cloud services and platforms. However, the existing application structure will have to be modified to achieve these benefits.The following is a list of services that we provide to our customers to realize the NFR  benefits:

• Converting monoliths to microservices
• Making services stateless and scalable
• Containerizing applications 
• Automating test and deployment process
• Adopting cloud-friendly tech stack and frameworks
• Implementing on-demand cloud services
• Building data lakes, data science, AI, ML and NLP applications 

The choice of the above services is very application-specific and depends on the technology stack, future roadmap and business requirements. Iris helps organizations transition to cloud, taking an application-specific approach to achieve their business goals at optimal TCO.  We deliver these services using flexible engagement models, allowing our clients to drive their transformation journey with complete control over processes, project budget, timelines and transparency.