For the last decade, the technology industry has beaten a familiar drum: modernise your applications, processes and data. Vendors and resellers offered incredible IT benefits such as lower operational costs, faster time to market and low to no downtime when deploying new applications or versions.
Our company, LSD Open has been championing these exact benefits as a modernisation services provider, helping organisations break down rigid monoliths into agile microservices. Today, though, I can feel that the conversation is shifting.
The world around you is increasingly volatile, as you move from one “unprecedented time” to another. Between geopolitical tensions, unpredictable supply chains and sanctions on countries, you can also feel the additional pressure of sudden shifts in vendor offerings and the influence of exchange rate variations.
This has fundamentally changed the “why” behind modernisation, as business leaders aren’t just asking how to deploy code faster. The ask has evolved to how to protect their organisations from rapid changes.
And they’re correct. Modernisation is the ultimate corporate insurance policy for business continuity. Companies are de-risking operations by adopting cloud native principles and shifting to microservices, so that external factors have a diminished impact on day-to-day business.
The reason behind this comes down to four simple factors.
1. Absolute portability, even beyond hyperscalers
Let’s address a hard truth: hyperscalers can, and do, go down. If you used a lift-and-shift migration strategy when you moved, for example, a legacy application into a major public cloud provider’s estate, and that region goes completely dark, you aren’t guaranteed disaster recovery. Most organisations have disaster recovery within the region, and only to the different availability zones. If your applications are anchored to traditional, monolithic infrastructure, even in the cloud, you are still vulnerable.
The answer lies in portability. By containerising applications and orchestrating them with Kubernetes, organisations achieve true portability. If a region or a facility drops, you can spin up your affected applications elsewhere with near-zero downtime. The move from static databases to modernised data structures like event streaming means that your data becomes a continuous stream. Modernisation ensures that you can redeploy somewhere else at a moment’s notice, wherever your data is available. You can see a recent example of this in a project where we helped the Purple Group.
2. Strategically de-risking the enterprise
Risk management today extends far beyond traditional disaster recovery; it involves regional instability and global unpredictability. When your architecture is cloud native and highly portable, you have the infinitely useful ability to move your applications and data to another country or region instantly.
Because containers package the application with all its necessary dependencies, you eliminate the anxiety of “how long will this take?” or “will it even work in the new environment?”. You actively de-risk your business operations against regional shocks, all while continuing to reap the baseline benefits of agility and cost reduction.
3. Total governance on the move
Keeping your data and intellectual property secure is more critical than ever. However, security cannot come at the expense of agility.
Modern cloud-native architectures allow you to bake governance and compliance directly into your deployment pipelines. This means that when you need to move a workload globally, you aren’t leaving your security posture behind. You retain the ability to be completely portable and dramatically de-risk your organisation, all while operating securely within your organisation’s strictest guardrails.
4. Escaping the lock-in trap
The threat of lock-in isn’t just about databases or proprietary enterprise software; it’s also about your deployment engine. We are witnessing scenarios worldwide where access to proprietary software can be restricted, like in some sanctioned countries or if a vendor decides to make the platform financially restrictive.
Furthermore, many organisations make the fatal mistake of tightly coupling their DevOps and CI/CD pipelines to a specific platform by using internally provided tools. If that platform experiences an outage or you are forced to migrate, you have to painstakingly rewrite all your deployment mechanisms. By abstracting your delivery systems, like using platform-agnostic, cloud-native tools, you ensure that if disaster strikes, you can point your pipelines to a new destination. You retain control of your own destiny and can move the moment a decision is made.
The new era of modernisation changes the narrative to modernising purely for the sake of IT efficiency. Today, modernising applications and data is about building an untethered, resilient and secure enterprise. It is about ensuring business continuity, regardless of what happens in the world, so that you can adapt, move and thrive.