Hit the Mark with Modernization

How to start modernizing your business

In today’s economy, every company is a tech company.

The realm of CIOs and CTOs—IT, hardware, infrastructure—is no longer just a cost center for companies. Instead, that realm is now being looked to for ways to drive revenue, increase competitiveness, and function as a direct channel for communication with customers.

But take a survey of technologists and you’ll likely find some common pain points. Talent acquisition and retention, for one. Resource availability and speed to market, for two and three.

Most of all, you’re going to hear about legacy systems—long-standing technology and processes that were once cutting edge but are now weighing heavily on your company’s productivity.

Modernizing these legacy systems is not as simple as buying new hardware and software. Unless you know what you’re trying to achieve through modernization, you won’t be in a position to build a successful roadmap to get there.

As an example, let’s look at adopting a technology like machine learning (ML).

There’s a lot of potential in ML. On the revenue front alone, companies are putting the technology to work to improve customer acquisition, surface better product recommendations, and automate business processes.

But for many companies, tapping into ML’s potential remains a challenge. In fact, 90% of ML models cooked up by data scientists never make it into production, a fact that would be laughable if companies weren’t investing so heavily in the technology.

Why is the percentage so high? One of the biggest culprits is a company’s failure to understand its own technical maturity before diving into ML.

Put another way, a company may have figured out how to adopt the technology, but they never took the time to ask why they were adopting it in the first place.

This may not seem like a huge deal, but a failure to understand what you’re actually trying to accomplish with tech like ML is similar to throwing darts at a blank dartboard. You may hit the target, but so what? You don’t even know what you’re playing for.

ML is just one example of where a failure to understand technical maturity can lead a company into the wilderness. Cloud adoption, advances like microservices and containers, artificial intelligence (AI)—any new tech and step toward modernization needs a path through the trees.

That’s why using a Technical Maturity Framework needs to be the first move a CTO makes before attempting to modernize legacy systems.

Levels of technical maturity

While a Technical Maturity Framework can provide an assessment of a company’s overall capabilities and readiness to adopt new technologies, different companies have different levels of maturity in specific areas.

One company may be advanced in DevOps, for example, but less sophisticated in operations and managed services providers (MSPs).

In our own Technical Maturity Framework, we give a detailed assessment of capabilities on a ranked scale. Eight categories are examined during the assessment in total.

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  Cloud technology

  Your company has the ability to run workloads in hybrid clouds and is agnostic toward the provider you use. You are also adept at automation and have wide redundancy across cloud platforms.

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  DevOps

  Your company has a fully automated lifecycle of infrastructure and applications, from checking code into GIT to running in production. As a result, you are able to achieve maximum efficiency in deployment cycles.

• 

  Multi-Cloud Operations

  Your company is leveraging the flexibility and 24/7 availability of an MSP partner. This allows you to spend more time innovating rather than keeping networks and hardware running smoothly.

• 

  Enterprise Infrastructure

  Your company utilizes routing on the host and has greatly reduced failure domains. You have also eliminated Layer-2 technologies like MLAG and Spanning Tree.

• 

  Data

  Your company has SDS multi-site and multi-cloud solutions in place, has automated data placement and lifecycle, and has a breadth of data sources. In addition, you employ prescriptive analytics and use backup/secondary data for analytics.

• 

  Code Development

  Your company is multi-cloud aware in order to use the best solutions regardless of cloud provider and has a thorough understanding of their scale and hosting costs. You also perform continuous integration with security review, governance monitoring, and robust redundancy in place for maximum efficiency.

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  Security & Governance

  Your company is adept at real-time analytics, integration of security tools, automated event-driven responses to events, and utilizing a preemptive security framework. This provides you with the highest level of visibility into security events while also reducing overhead due to automated threat mitigation.

• 

  AI/ML

  Your company has complete automation of actionable analytics to drive decisions, along with bots to reduce the need for human interactions. Your data is stored and secured in such a way that you are able to run AI and ML workloads freely and efficiently in order to discover unknown correlations across data sets.