Turning to application modernization to reduce IT costs and increase agility

Transcription

1 Turning to Application Modernization to Reduce IT Costs and Increase Agility 1 Turning to application to reduce IT costs and increase agility Government leaders and stakeholders are increasing the pressure on IT to build solutions that are more agile, cost efficient and responsive to the needs of employees and citizens. To keep up with innovation in the private sector, government IT professionals are turning to initiatives such as cloud computing, virtualization, big data and mobility. But to enable modern, agile and efficient IT infrastructures for these critical technologies, savvy IT pros realize they must modernize their legacy applications. Here s why application is becoming more and more important to the implementation of today s IT strategies and how IT should approach and deliver a successful application plan.

2 2 Turning to Application Modernization to Reduce IT Costs and Increase Agility Application is one of the most critical initiatives for enterprise IT agencies today. Legacy applications, particularly those on mainframe and proprietary Unix platforms, can be extremely costly to maintain, imposing serious limitations on an agency s ability to deliver the agility needed for many of today s most important IT opportunities, including virtualization, cloud computing, mobility and big data. In a recent survey of government IT leaders, 41 percent said they were turning to legacy to realize efficiencies and improve ROI. 1 Gartner has urged IT leaders to place IT at the core of their objectives an admonition that goes as far back as 2008, before many of the major shifts that are driving IT today. 2 IDC has said application has shifted from an optional activity to a requirement. 3 41% of government IT officials said they were turning to legacy to realize efficiencies and improve ROI. What are the key factors behind this compelling and increasingly urgent need for application? Mostly they have to do with facilitating agility, reducing costs and creating the proper foundation for next-generation government. According to one survey, the top four reasons cited as motivations for modernizing legacy applications were to: Facilitate integration with other applications Reduce maintenance costs Meet user change requests faster Eliminate unsupported hardware and software In addition to these challenges, Gartner cites the potential for increased obsolescence of deployed assets. While IT management teams may be able to keep systems on life support for some time, Gartner warns that there is a finite limit to the willingness of users to keep on using solutions that fail to deliver modern standards of functionality and agility. The benefits of application A successful application initiative will deliver significant benefits to government agencies, including: Lower costs: Application will have a dramatic impact on spending by reducing hardware, software and maintenance costs. Agencies will be able to utilize lower-cost application servers and use virtualization to eliminate server sprawl. Annual licensing fees will go down dramatically, and the agency will be able to save money by utilizing industrystandard platforms that don t require expensive personnel with specialized and increasingly obsolescent skill sets. Increased agility: IT will be able to respond much more rapidly to user change requests and deploy new applications and updates far more efficiently. With increased virtualization of mission-critical applications, and with the advent of cloud infrastructures, application will be an enabler of the type of self-service environments that are beginning to define next-generation government IT initiatives. Greater integration: One of the challenges of legacy applications is that they tend to be managed as a separate silo from other applications, particularly those running on different and more modern platforms. This isolation is a huge barrier to agility and must be addressed among all applications across the enterprise. While there are tools available to integrate legacy applications with modern architectures, it is far simpler and more cost efficient to perform the integration on a distributed platform built on industry-standard technology. Legacy investment protection: A successful IT program will protect existing investments, not necessarily in all of the hardware, but in the logic, processes and intellectual property that have made the

3 Turning to Application Modernization to Reduce IT Costs and Increase Agility 3 legacy applications an integral part of the agency. The goal should be to modernize applications without replacing all aspects of the legacy environment. Government transformation: Today s applications and infrastructure must be enablers of transformation, not inhibitors. Modernization is critical for the deployment of all of the most important trends driving IT cloud computing, virtualization, mobility, social media, big data, compliance and others. As IDC states, We are living in an era that is characterized by an ever-quickening pace of technological change. We will witness exceptional disruptive transformations at both the front end and the back end of computing systems and the architectures and applications that run on them. Approaches to application Although IT sounds like it would be a complex and risky undertaking, today s tools and techniques from Dell actually make the process relatively simple and doable within a reasonable timeframe. The far greater risk to the future of government is to not modernize and leave the applications on the mainframe or proprietary Unix platform. Dell s solutions enable enterprise agencies to: Re-host mainframe applications on modern, lower-cost open platforms. Mainframe rehosting software from Dell uses existing investments in mainframe applications and data while providing a scalable and stable environment for migrated mainframe workloads of any type. Re-architect legacy applications to run on modern architectures such as C#, Java or Microsoft.NET. With this approach, agencies can eliminate obsolete functionality and code while maintaining relevant functionality. Extend legacy assets through a serviceoriented architecture approach. This will allow agencies to modernize processes to take advantage of modern platforms while migrating key logic. For example, Dell Web Connect can be applied to transform inflexible legacy applications into modern Web applications while leaving the underlying logic and data processes unchanged. Replace legacy applications with a package, if a packaged option is available, that incorporates most of the existing application s functionality. Taking this approach is probably best considered when the particular application under consideration addresses commodity functionality or when an agency is moving to an enterprise system such as SAP. Agencies also have the option of purchasing a portfolio assessment to help set direction and create a strategic roadmap for individual applications. In a portfolio assessment, source code assets and data structures are analyzed, along with application interdependencies. A comprehensive inventory of technical assets is also collected to produce a realistic view of how the legacy application currently meets agency objectives and show what benefits a pragmatic application overhaul strategy that balances goals with modern technical enablers could provide. Success stories in application Government agencies all over the world are reaping tremendous benefits from modernizing their applications, including huge reductions in total cost of ownership and improved IT agility. Here are a couple examples: City of McKinney, Texas: As a city recently ranked twice by Money magazine as one of the top-five best places to live in the U.S., the city of McKinney, Texas, is experiencing a population growth by leaps and bounds. More residents mean a greater burden on city services. With 200 applications, including police and fire systems, miles of fiber and hundreds of switches and firewalls, the city IT department must have its finger on the pulse of any issues that arise

4 4 Turning to Application Modernization to Reduce IT Costs and Increase Agility swiftly. We need to know about problems before they happen, because in our environment, with police and fire services, it could be the difference between life and death, says city of McKinney Infrastructure Director Marcus Coleman. The city badly needed better IT tools to track application performance and integrate disparate systems. Dell s Foglight Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Toad Data Modeler were just what the city needed to enable superior insight into its Web and legacy applications without an enormous capital investment. It also enhanced services to users, allowed utilization of cuttingedge technologies, improved troubleshooting and enabled deeper integration of separate applications. The upgrade ultimately allowed the city to reap greater productivity from the existing infrastructure. We have a central pane of glass to view all our applications with Foglight APM, says Coleman. We can be more proactive and get ahead of problems before they occur. City of Redondo Beach, California: Beach towns are always desirable residential locations, and Redondo Beach, Calif., just 20 miles shy of L.A., is no different. With a bustling population of 67,000, a full harbor, 40 parks and a host of municipal offerings, the city s tiny IT team of 8 struggled to maintain delivery of fast, reliable services to its constituents and city staff. The IT infrastructure needed a major update, and to accomplish that at minimal impact to the city s budget, Redondo Beach engaged Dell Application and Deployment Services. The Dell team implemented 55 virtualized desktops for public access, remote desktop access and virtualized applications for city employees, migrated networks and systems, and mirrored storage to boost the city s disaster recovery capability. Today, IT deployments are 75 percent faster; city staff enjoy the flexibility of working remotely with access to the city s 160 city apps; leadership has peace of mind that should disaster strike, backup is handled; and large capital investments were avoided via cost-effective leasing programs. Chris Benson, city of Redondo Beach IT director, said that had his own team been tasked with the full deployment, it would have proven very challenging. By using Dell Services, we cut our implementation time from two months or more to just two weeks, and the Dell team partnered with us to work within our budget. Conclusion One of the biggest inhibitors to application is fear of change. Agencies are used to running in a certain way, and their legacy applications are a result of years of hard work and experience. But the reality is that the world is changing all around these applications and they must be re-made to function and provide benefits in today s environment. That means they must be modernized re-hosted, re-architected, re-used or even replaced if the agency is to take advantage of the cost and agility benefits of modern IT infrastructures. Fortunately, the tools to deliver this type of are readily available, simple to deploy, and, with Dell, backed by an organization with significant experience and commitment to making work. Application provides IT with a pathway to the future, and when it comes to virtualization, cloud computing, big data, mobility and other key IT initiatives it is clear that the future, most certainly, is now. Endnotes 1. Center for Digital Government and Public CIO Improving Government Performance Survey, Gartner Says IT Leaders Must Place IT Modernization at the Core of Their 2008 Objectives, Gartner, February 26, Modernizing Application Platforms for Cost- Effective Cloud Readiness, IDC, May 2012

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