Digital modernization and APIs

You have already learned a lot about what digital transformation is. As you know already, digital transformation is the adoption of new, advanced, digital technologies, processes, people, and culture to transform your business. You have looked at ways to approach transformation and understand business benefits such as improved customer experience.

What you might be confused about is what digital modernization is. Is it the same as digital transformation? While many of the concepts are similar, the adoptions are looked at slightly differently.

Digital modernization is the practice of upgrading and/or implementing new technology, platforms (cloud or hybrid), and software innovations to meet the needs of today's organizations. Digital modernization has a focus on making infrastructure and operations improved to a point where the maintenance of systems is reduced – both financially and operationally. Legacy systems were expensive to provision and maintain and as time passed, finding resources to maintain them was difficult. IT functions are constantly under pressure to support new capabilities such as data analytics, continuous integration, and integration with SaaS applications and other state-of-the-art vendors.

The easiest way to do this is through a platform that has a cloud-based digital infrastructure. IBM's Cloud Paks provides such a capability.

Modernization can be implemented in a variety of ways. You should consider different approaches. Let's identify some of them.

Approaches to modernization

Just like what you learned about digital transformation, there are many ways to approach modernization. Depending on your current digital makeup, consider the following approaches:

• Migrate your existing systems to the cloud: Move your legacy systems to the cloud. If you run application servers, you can now move your deployments to containerized application servers such as Liberty. This would reduce costs in your data center and simplify operations.
• Utilize APIs to modernize: There may be some legacy systems that are just too difficult to containerize. In those cases, you can extend their capabilities by exposing APIs to new customers.
• Chip away at your existing monolithic systems: As a sculptor, you can take a massive rock and begin chipping away to make it more manageable. These newer deployable components can then be applied either on-premises or in the cloud.
• Begin microservices projects: As we mentioned chipping away, one way to begin is to start developing microservices that you can build incrementally. Since this type of development may be new to your organization, it will prove to be invaluable as this will reduce the complexity, introduce deployment experience, and provide valuable experience for future microservice projects. Orchestrating containers can be managed by Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a piece of software that automates container orchestration, thereby replacing – with automation – operational tasks such as automatic scaling, deployment, and self-healing. Kubernetes can run on-premises as well as on cloud environments, giving you the flexibility to digitally transform and modernize. Nothing builds confidence more than successful outcomes.
• Leave nothing behind: To achieve modernization and capitalize on the digital transformation, you need to begin moving away from older technologies and focus on the new. When the goal is to modernize, there is nothing worse than having multiple silos with bits and pieces of legacy systems that never were sunset. This is one of the causes of digital transformation failures.

There are many benefits to digital modernization. By modernizing your applications, you help accelerate your digital transformation goal. And by adopting cloud-native architecture and containerization, your applications can be deployed faster. Your ability to utilize a hybrid cloud approach gives you greater flexibility in deployments and improved delivery. With modernized APIs and DevOps, your transition will be more agile, more consistent, and you'll deliver solutions that meet your digital transformation for your organization.