Application modernization, with the intent to fit an organization with global-scale infrastructures, is central to becoming a digital-first organization. AWS works with IDC Asia Pacific to release a series of publications to provide best practices and perspectives at the regional and country level. The highlights include:

• Application modernization is a journey and requires a holistic and dynamic approach to deliver successful transformation. Therefore, organizations need to understand clearly and manage the three drivers for application modernization:
  • Sustain – cost containment for greater operational resilience
  • Accelerate – delivering agile and continuous app innovation for improved productivity and end-user experience, and finally
  • Transformation – leveraging data analytics provided by apps to generate new revenue streams and enhance decision making.

These distinct drivers are viable steps for organizations to undertake while embarking on their own unique Digital Transformation (DX) initiatives.

• Different applications have different modernization priorities. Some require scalability, some greater composability, others better price for performance. Some are non-negotiable such as security and energy efficiency.
• Once organizations understand their portfolio goals and have prioritized the workloads to modernize, they must adopt one of several approaches such as re-platform, re-host, rewrite and coordinate across multiple business and technical leaders to help achieve their objectives.
• IT infrastructure technologies have evolved to support organizations’ workload modernization needs. Cloud technologies offer the preeminent enabler of app modernization – our survey suggests half of Asia Pacific organizations have a cloud-first strategy in place today, showing that the transition to a cloud-centric, global-scale infrastructure is well underway.

To conclude, this study considers typical application modernization journeys across key industries and countries within Asia Pacific and provide essential guidance to accelerate resiliency, innovation, scalability, and agility for digital-first organizations.