Where updates to the old monolithic Cobol systems could only be deployed once or twice a year, today smaller, more regular changes can be made by the DWP developer team. Those developers can also start to experiment in a dev/test environment on Amazon Web Services, build out a set of reusable APIs to expose key data sources, and push changes through a CI/CD pipeline.
The enterprise modernization journey is in early stages
All these moves show an industry still in the early stages of a major shift, away from business applications residing on-premises to those distributed into microservices, packaged into containers, and hosted in massive cloud data centers. As Amazon CEO Andy Jassy keeps saying, we are still at the early stages of enterprise cloud adoption.
Although everyone’s definition of what can be classed as legacy will be different, the events of the past year have highlighted the fact that brittle and inflexible systems will hold your business back. Even as global vaccination efforts continue apace and the world returns to some semblance of normality, the ways people work, shop, and exercise have irrevocably changed. Businesses that ignore these shifts are at severe risk of becoming legacy themselves.