Business
Strategy
Culture and
Organization
People and
Operational Efficiency
Architecture and
Migrations
Data and
Intelligence
Security and
Governance
Application modernization:
Where does your business stand?
Uncover your organization’s strengths, opportunities, and what to prioritize next in your modernization journey, based on the insights in the recently published Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader's Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud.
Take this 10-minute assessment to learn your company’s strengths and areas for improvement across six key areas of application modernization:
- - Business strategy
- - Culture and organization
- - People and operational efficiency
- - Architecture and migrations
- - Data and intelligence
- - Security and governance
When you’re finished, you’ll receive an interactive graph to illustrate your current fluency with these concepts, detailed evaluations for each, information on best practices, and links to resources that can help you take the next step.
Your assessment begins on the next page—just fill out the form, submit your info, and you’re on your way.
Your results
Thanks for completing the assessment! Your results are ready along with customized recommendations on how you should move forward.
To see results, click on a plus symbol or
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- Business Strategy
- Culture and Organization
- People and Operational Efficiency
- Architecture and Migrations
- Data and Intelligence
- Security and Governance
Business Strategy
Your Results
Best Practice
Modernizing applications requires a strict alignment of IT and business strategies that accelerate toward a singular, bold goal. Your chosen objective will be unique in its details, but it must be founded upon a common theme: quickly, continuously, and reliably rolling out innovations that delight your customers and give you advantages over your competition.
Looking at your results, it appears you may have begun considering the financial implications of modernization. Now it’s time to develop and begin executing your singular goal—making sure it’s based on guiding principles and KPIs that your key stakeholders can all agree upon. Choose a group of team members from both business and IT—including all levels of seniority—and ask them: Why do you think we should modernize applications? Their answers may surprise you and can help guide you toward creating a successful modernization strategy.
Recommendations based on your results
Business Strategy
Your Results
Best Practice
Modernizing applications requires a strict alignment of IT and business strategies that accelerate toward a singular, bold goal. Your chosen objective will be unique in its details, but it must be founded upon a common theme: quickly, continuously, and reliably rolling out innovations that delight your customers and give you advantages over your competition.
Your responses indicate you’ve likely begun work aligning strategies for executives and IT behind an overarching goal. Now it’s time to refine the details. Begin combining your priorities, principles, and data-based projections into a business case so tightly woven that even your most cynical stakeholder is sure to enthusiastically offer support.
Recommendations based on your results
Business Strategy
Your Results
Best Practice
Modernizing applications requires a strict alignment of IT and business strategies that accelerate toward a singular, bold goal. Your chosen objective will be unique in its details, but it must be founded upon a common theme: quickly, continuously, and reliably rolling out innovations that delight your customers and give you advantages over your competition.
Your responses indicate you’re ahead of the game in business strategy. You’ve rallied your teams around a common goal, and now you’re refining individual processes to align with your objectives. Continue to evolve your strategies while developing contingency plans and exit strategies, recognizing that market conditions (and decision-makers at your organization) are subject to change at a moment’s notice.
Recommendations based on your results
Business Strategy
Your Results
Best Practice
IT and executives are operating in lockstep and executing against agreed-upon KPIs. You’ve deployed mechanisms that maximize your agility and are prepared to pivot and execute proven exit strategies when needed.
67% of businesses believe they must pick up the pace of modernization to remain competitive.
Need help developing a best practice business strategy? Consider working with one of our Partners:
Culture and Organization
Your Results
Best Practice
Today’s hypercompetitive market demands that you create a culture that’s both attractive to top individual talent and fosters productive teamwork. This often involves changing team structure, which can be difficult but also has big rewards. Cox Automotive, for example, has greatly accelerated its application pipeline through the use of small, cross-functional teams.
Before you can make strides toward application development, you need to build a foundation of cloud competency across your organization. Start by creating a small cloud-platform team of talented cross-functional individuals and tasking them to complete a simple cloud-related project. Once this team is successful, you’ll split it up and create new teams, grouping the original members with additional workers to whom they’ll pass on their knowledge. Think of it as cellular mitosis but for cloud proficiency.
Recommendations based on your results
Culture and Organization
Your Results
Best Practice
Today’s hypercompetitive market demands that you create a culture that’s both attractive to top individual talent and fosters productive teamwork. This often involves changing team structure, which can be difficult but also has big rewards. Cox Automotive, for example, has greatly accelerated its application pipeline through the use of small, cross-functional teams.
Your responses indicate that you likely already have your cloud-enablement engine up and running. To truly position your teams for success, you’ll need to shift from an activity-based model (“make it as quickly and cheaply as possible”) to a product-based model (“keep experimenting and learning until you find what works”) You might also consider shifting your management structure to one that starts with what your customers want and works backward from there.
Recommendations based on your results
Culture and Organization
Your Results
Best Practice
Today’s hypercompetitive market demands that you create a culture that’s both attractive to top individual talent and fosters productive teamwork. This often involves changing team structure, which can be difficult but also has big rewards. Cox Automotive, for example, has greatly accelerated its application pipeline through the use of small, cross-functional teams.
It looks like you’re well-positioned for success in this area, with a cloud- enablement engine running and your culture adjusted to a product-based, customer-centric model. Now it’s time to look to the future with a long-term success plan. Start thinking about how you can sustainably expand your organizational model as your business grows. Look for ways to push experimentation even further. And search for opportunities to spread cloud proficiency to every department in your organization.
Recommendations based on your results
Culture and Organization
Your Results
Best Practice
You’ve not only bridged the IT skills gap—you’ve also created a pipeline combining recruitment, training, and modern organization models to ensure it stays that way. Your developers are fluent in everything cloud, and they’re ready to unleash continuous innovation through modern applications.
By 2020, 75% of organizations will experience visible business disruptions due to IT skills gaps.
Need help developing a best practice business strategy? Consider working with one of our Partners:
People and Operational Efficiency
Your Results
Best Practice
Bridging the IT skills gap—the ever-growing chasm between technology and staff capabilities—is essential to your modernization efforts, and it will likely require you to recruit some new talent. Embracing new operational mindsets may lead you to a surprising conclusion, however: Many of the people you already have actually are the people you need.
Your results indicate you are just getting started in this area. Your first step might be to implement a training plan to upskill technical and non-technical employees alike.
Recommendations based on your results
People and Operational Efficiency
Your Results
Best Practice
Bridging the IT skills gap—the ever-growing chasm between technology and staff capabilities—is essential to your modernization efforts, and it will likely require you to recruit some new talent. Embracing new operational mindsets may lead you to a surprising conclusion, however: Many of the people you already have actually are the people you need.
Your results tell us you’ve progressed some in this area. If you haven’t already, look toward embracing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). CI/CD allows your developers to focus less on day-to-day operations and more on rapidly turning innovative ideas into practical realities. For example, Lululemon used CI/CD to decrease the time it spent building new production accounts from two days to a few minutes.
Recommendations based on your results
People and Operational Efficiency
Your Results
Best Practice
Bridging the IT skills gap—the ever-growing chasm between technology and staff capabilities—is essential to your modernization efforts, and it will likely require you to recruit some new talent. Embracing new operational mindsets may lead you to a surprising conclusion, however: Many of the people you already have actually are the people you need.
Your results tell us you’re likely practicing CI/CD at a high rate, and your developers feel they have autonomy and value. Look to push results further by greater tracking of standard metrics, committing code to the main trunk and/or keeping feature branches short-lived, and using distinct pipelines for each branch and team. Follow the example of companies like Lululemon, which used CI/CD to decrease the time it spent building new production accounts from two days to a few minutes.
Recommendations based on your results
People and Operational Efficiency
Your Results
Best Practice
You’ve built a developer-friendly workplace that maximizes productivity through cross-functional teams, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD. Your people feel free to experiment, innovate, and even fail. They fully understand their roles and are confident in their ability to execute them.
Teams that practice CI/CD spend 44% more of their time creating new features and code.
Need help developing a best practice business strategy? Consider working with one of our Partners:
Architecture and Migrations
Your Results
Best Practice
Creating the high-performance, massively scalable, and reliably resilient applications your business needs today requires you to modernize applications across key architectural pillars. These include (but are not limited to): microservices, serverless computing, and containers. Look to examples like Travelex, which has increased its deployment frequency from eight times a year to hundreds of times a week through the use of modern architectures.
Looking at your results, it seems you’re just getting started on this journey. If it feels like you need to choose between embracing new development paradigms and migrating to the cloud, the choice is simple—migrate as much to the cloud as you can first. From there, you can take advantage of cloud-native features that will make modern development architectures easier to use.
Recommendations based on your results
Architecture and Migrations
Your Results
Best Practice
Creating the high-performance, massively scalable, and reliably resilient applications your business needs today requires you to modernize applications across key architectural pillars. These include (but are not limited to): microservices, serverless computing, and containers. Look to examples like Travelex, which has increased its deployment frequency from eight times a year to hundreds of times a week through the use of modern architectures.
Looking at your results, it seems like you’ve begun breaking down monoliths and refactoring applications. Now it’s time to think about how you can expand these new architectural paradigms. Carefully consider your existing applications and their features and start thinking about where you can draw new boundaries to restructure them with microservices, containers, etc.
Recommendations based on your results
Architecture and Migrations
Your Results
Best Practice
Creating the high-performance, massively scalable, and reliably resilient applications your business needs today requires you to modernize applications across key architectural pillars. These include (but are not limited to): microservices, serverless computing, and containers. Look to examples like Travelex, which has increased its deployment frequency from eight times a year to hundreds of times a week through the use of modern architectures.
Looking at your results, it’s likely your organization is already using these new architectural paradigms to some degree. You should focus your next efforts on expanding these practices and bringing them together into a unified, fully fault-tolerant framework.
Recommendations based on your results
Architecture and Migrations
Your Results
Best Practice
You’ve widely adopted modern development processes and integrated them into a hybrid cloud, well-architected framework that consistently delivers operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
Samsung reduced its monthly compute costs 44.5% by migrating to a container-based engine.
Need help developing a best practice business strategy? Consider working with one of our Partners:
Data and Intelligence
Your Results
Best Practice
Today's organizations must view applications and data as a continuum. Your business collects data, which drives development of intelligent applications. These applications generate new data in the form of analytics. Those analytics are boiled down into insights, which drive development of new features and applications. The cycle spins on and on, growing more efficient and powerful with each rotation--but only if you've empowered your teams with the right tools and processes.
Your responses indicate that you're still in the early stages of this journey. Before you start embracing new technologies and practices, you need to focus on creating a broad data strategy across application development and analytics.
Recommendations based on your results
Data and Intelligence
Your Results
Best Practice
Today's organizations must view applications and data as a continuum. Your business collects data, which drives development of intelligent applications. These applications generate new data in the form of analytics. Those analytics are boiled down into insights, which drive development of new features and applications. The cycle spins on and on, growing more efficient and powerful with each rotation--but only if you've empowered your teams with the right tools and processes.
Your responses indicate that you've likely begun adppting purpose-built databases, which is a great first step. The more you allow your developers to choose the right databases for the right jobs, the more efficient and successful they will be. Continue expanding your use of relational, key value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, and ledger databases.
Recommendations based on your results
Data and Intelligence
Your Results
Best Practice
Today's organizations must view applications and data as a continuum. Your business collects data, which drives development of intelligent applications. These applications generate new data in the form of analytics. Those analytics are boiled down into insights, which drive development of new features and applications. The cycle spins on and on, growing more efficient and powerful with each rotation--but only if you've empowered your teams with the right tools and processes.
Your responses indicate that you've likely begun adopting purpose-built databases to more efficiently build data-driven applications and that you're at least exploring intelligent technologies like ML to improve analytics. We recommend you continue along these trajectories and work toward combining your efforts into a broad data strategy that includes lifecycle management.
Recommendations based on your results
Data and Intelligence
Your Results
Best Practice
You’ve created a comprehensive strategy around data and application development, with foundations in purpose-built databases and AI/ML. With increasing efficiency and speed, you’re creating applications that can support millions of global users, draw from massive data volumes with sub-millisecond latency, and provide consistent experiences across desktop, mobile, and IoT platforms.
Only 18% of companies have a clear strategy in place for sourcing the data that makes AI/ML work.
Need help developing a best practice business strategy? Consider working with one of our Partners:
Security and Governance
Your Results
Best Practice
Containers, microservices, and other features of modern applications reshape the framework of your applications, altering their attack surface in a way that renders many traditional security measures ineffective. To prevent threats from spreading from container to container or service to service, your organization will need to deploy a modern, multi-pronged security approach.
It looks like you’re likely just getting started in this area. One place you might want to start is with a risk assessment of your current application development processes and your infrastructure as a whole. You might also conduct a responsibility audit to determine which security functions will be taken care of by your vendors and partners—and which fall squarely upon your organization’s shoulders.
Recommendations based on your results
Security and Governance
Your Results
Best Practice
Containers, microservices, and other features of modern applications reshape the framework of your applications, altering their attack surface in a way that renders many traditional security measures ineffective. To prevent threats from spreading from container to container or service to service, your organization will need to deploy a modern, multi-pronged security approach.
It looks like you’ve made some progress in this area. If you’re not already, consider using tools that enable best practices such as image scanning, the running of containers as unprivileged and non-root, automatic communication between authorized services on an as-needed basis, and end-to-end threat monitoring.
Recommendations based on your results
Security and Governance
Your Results
Best Practice
Containers, microservices, and other features of modern applications reshape the framework of your applications, altering their attack surface in a way that renders many traditional security measures ineffective. To prevent threats from spreading from container to container or service to service, your organization will need to deploy a modern, multi-pronged security approach.
It looks like you’re fairly advanced in this area and likely have already adopted best practices such as container-specific security, policy-based network security, and end-to-end threat detection. One final piece you might consider is centralized logs. Logs are essential for troubleshooting, but they won’t do you much good unless they’re easily accessible through a dedicated log analysis tool.
Recommendations based on your results
Security and Governance
Your Results
Best Practice
You’ve adopted all the modern protocols necessary to secure applications of every shape and size. You’re enforcing a no-tolerance approach to vulnerabilities and have embedded automated security checks throughout the application lifecycle. Your governance framework takes full advantage of the cloud, and your security and risk policies are precisely aligned to your business objectives.