There is no one-size-fits-all approach to IT modernization. The strategy typically encompasses an overhaul of infrastructure and applications in the cloud, with the goal of enhancing agility by leveraging cloud-native constructs and laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence (AI). There are four key drivers behind modernization initiatives, and each requires a somewhat different approach and tool set.
1. Business-value-driven modernization
This approach aligns cloud migration and application modernization with overall business goals. Objectives include enhancing efficiency, inspiring innovation, and gaining competitive advantage.
For example, a leading Australian bank migrated its core payments platform to the cloud, transitioning from a monolithic system to a microservices architecture. The shift enhanced security, reduced operational costs, and accelerated release cycles. The payoff was in enabling faster innovation and improved customer experience. The project strengthened the bank’s resilience and positioned it for future growth.
2. Data-center-exit-driven modernization
Organizations often migrate to the cloud to reduce their data center footprint, particularly when facing lease expirations or escalating operational costs. These migrations typically begin with a lift-and-shift approach, followed by gradual modernization to cloud-native services.
Moving workloads to the cloud quickly improves application performance and availability. Once executives and business users see the benefits of faster and more stable services, they often want to undertake more comprehensive modernization efforts. Adopting cloud-based tools to support agile practices, such as “shift-left” development and DevSecOps (development, security, and operations), increases the speed and quality of deliverables. Cloud analytics delivers new business insights. A migration begun for pragmatic reasons thus becomes a strategic initiative.
3. Relieve technical debt
Technical debt is the long-term burden created by choosing short-term fixes over more robust, long-term approaches to building software and managing infrastructure. Over time it can become a significant budget drain and an impediment to organizational agility.
With advancements in cloud tools and generative AI, organizations can now prioritize technical debt remediation as part of their migration strategy. Instead of merely shifting to the cloud, they can modernize legacy applications to enhance scalability, improve performance, and adopt agile development practices.
For example, a U.S. financial services company remediated its technical debt by migrating applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services, simplifying its technology stack and preventing future debt accumulation.
4. Adopt hybrid cloud
Many organizations must maintain a mix of on-premises infrastructure and public cloud services, for regulatory, latency, or workload-balancing reasons. A hybrid cloud strategy enables them to shift workloads as needed between cloud infrastructure and cloud-like on-premises platforms. Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach through 2027,[1] and the most urgent generative AI challenge necessary to address over the next year will be data synchronization across hybrid cloud environments.
For example, a global financial services provider wanted to avoid the capital investments of renewing an expiring data center lease. It adopted a hybrid cloud approach by migrating certain workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS while leveraging AWS-native services for others. This approach improved system resilience, reduced costs, and streamlined operations with 24/7 cloud support.
HCLTech’s FENIX framework prioritizes application modernization by analyzing business capabilities, not just applications. It maps differentiated capabilities to the organization’s enterprise architecture vision and guides modernization decisions such as lift-and-shift versus transformation. Such an approach reimagines end-to-end value chains, starting from organizational goals and considering value streams, capabilities, processes, and applications. This holistic view ensures that cloud modernization efforts align with business strategy and deliver maximum value.
Cloud migration initiates IT modernization. When working with a partner, look for one that offers comprehensive tools and services, from system identification and application programming interface (API) integration to code transformation and application modernization. HCLTech’s AI Force Platform, with its Gen-AI solutions, boosts automation and efficiency in development and modernization, both on-premises and in the cloud. Effective change management is crucial throughout the modernization process.
Learn more about HCLTech and its FENIX framework.
[1] Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025, Gartner, Inc., press release, November 19, 2024