In the past decade, migrating to the cloud has been a significant turning point for businesses across the globe. The cloud has provided several benefits, including enhanced data access, flexibility, and streamlined deliveries, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nonetheless, modernizing or adopting the cloud is an ongoing process that involves selecting a suitable provider and planning a migration strategy to ensure the system’s smooth operation. As a result, it is imperative to invest in cloud modernization services to maintain operational efficiency, manage costs, and maximize the long-term value of your cloud investments.
What is Cloud Modernization?
Cloud modernization is the process of transforming critical legacy applications by updating their features, modernizing their architecture or infrastructure, and ensuring they are optimized for operating in cloud environments. A cloud environment alleviates the need for a company to purchase, maintain, and replace hardware. However, cloud costs can quickly escalate and get out of control in the absence of constant monitoring and optimization.
Why is Cloud Modernization Important?
Cloud modernization helps businesses eliminate resources wasted on inefficient, obsolete, and unoptimized processes. One of the major drawbacks of legacy applications is the difficulty in integrating them with new technologies. Moreover, if your applications cannot improve your user experience, your business loses the opportunity and fails to create a competitive advantage.
Without modernization, applications can become cumbersome and difficult to use. This also extends the software delivery lifecycle and complicates work further. However, if the application is modernized, it becomes more adaptable to new features and functions, which speeds up the software delivery process.
Cloud modernization makes it seamless for businesses to scale, add new users, and quickly boost capabilities. An application re-platformed to the cloud without modernization will require additional attention and resources. On the other hand, a modernized application compatible with cloud environments may scale with ease.
Three Cloud Modernization Strategies
A successful cloud modernization strategy prioritizes business needs before focusing on technology. As the cloud gains traction, organizations are exploring multiple ways to accelerate cloud adoption.
One: Lift and Shift Migration
Lift-and-shift migrations require lifting an application or landscape from its current hosting environment and shifting it to another. An exact copy of the top three layers: application, database, and Operating System (OS) layer, is performed in such migrations. This is also known as rehosting, and it entails shifting your stack to a new host with minimal changes. This allows for faster, more cost-effective migration, higher ROIs, and minimal disruption.
Migration from on-premises to the cloud increases agility and simplifies future avenues. This makes it an excellent choice for businesses with a conservative culture and those unsure about long-term cloud modernization. Yet, failure to modify your system hinders businesses from reaping key cloud migration benefits in the short run.
Two: Technical Migration
Technical migration, as a cloud modernization strategy, encompasses upgrading the Operating System (OS) and Database (DB) to meet specific transformational goals. This strategy is frequently carried out in stages to leverage cloud-native features.
Migrating from on-premises SAP ECC to Suite on HANA on the public cloud, for example, enables enterprises to benefit from HANA’s real-time visibility and significantly enhances performance, in addition to providing the benefits of the public cloud. Furthermore, technical migration will assist organizations in minimizing disruption and gaining cloud experience.
Three: Application Migration
Application migration involves the transformation of the application layer, the OS, and the database. While this can be challenging, businesses must guarantee that the new system and business process flow reproduce all features. Also, historical data must be audited. You will also need to retrain the team on a new suite of applications that may function quite differently from the previous application stack.
Enterprise-Scale Execution and Governance
At an enterprise scale, executing these strategies effectively requires structured governance, robust change management, and integrated cloud modernization services to ensure sustained performance, security, and measurable business outcomes.
The Role of Cloud Modernization Services in Enterprise Transformation
Enterprise cloud modernization rarely involves a single application or workload. Large organizations typically manage complex portfolios spanning legacy systems, custom applications, third-party platforms, data estates, and regulatory constraints across geographies. Without a structured approach, modernization efforts can become fragmented, costly, and misaligned with business priorities.
Cloud modernization services provide a disciplined framework to manage this complexity. They begin with a comprehensive portfolio assessment, aligning application criticality, technical debt, and business value to a structured modernization roadmap. This roadmap defines sequencing, dependencies, and measurable outcomes, ensuring modernization initiatives remain business-led rather than technology-driven.
Governance and compliance are embedded into the transformation journey, particularly for industries operating under strict regulatory mandates. Security baselines, policy controls, and audit readiness are integrated from the outset.
Execution is typically phased to reduce operational disruption and distribute investment over time. This staged approach enables validation at each milestone, allowing enterprises to manage risk, course-correct where necessary, and scale modernization with confidence. At scale, structured oversight and risk mitigation mechanisms become essential to sustaining performance, resilience, and long-term value realization.
Cloud Modernization Services vs In-House Modernization: What Enterprises Should Consider
Enterprises evaluating modernization approaches often weigh the benefits of in-house execution against engaging specialized cloud modernization services. The right choice depends on organizational maturity, resource availability, and transformation scope.
In-house modernization can be effective when organizations possess mature cloud expertise, established governance frameworks, and the bandwidth to manage cross-functional change. For smaller portfolios or incremental upgrades, internal teams may deliver cost efficiencies and retain tighter operational control.
However, modernization services tend to add value when transformation spans multiple business units, involves legacy complexity, or requires accelerated timelines. Service providers typically bring structured methodologies, modernization accelerators, and cross-industry experience that reduce trial-and-error execution. They can also supplement skill gaps in cloud architecture, DevSecOps, automation, and compliance management.
Trade-offs often center on cost versus speed, internal control versus external expertise, and short-term expenditure versus long-term risk mitigation. While in-house approaches may reduce vendor dependency, they can introduce execution risk if governance, skills, or scalability are limited. Conversely, modernization services may require upfront investment but can enhance predictability, reduce disruption, and strengthen compliance alignment.
A balanced evaluation should consider business objectives, risk tolerance, internal capability depth, and the strategic importance of cloud transformation to enterprise growth.
How to Evaluate a Cloud Modernization Services Provider
Selecting the right provider requires structured due diligence. Enterprises may consider the following checklist:
- Portfolio Assessment Approach
Does the provider conduct a comprehensive application and infrastructure assessment? Look for a data-driven evaluation model that categorizes workloads by business value, complexity, and modernization pathway. - Modernization Accelerators
Assess whether the provider offers automation tools, reusable frameworks, or prebuilt accelerators that reduce timelines and improve migration consistency. - Security and Compliance Capability
Evaluate expertise in regulatory alignment, security architecture, identity management, and audit readiness. Security should be embedded, not retrofitted. - Governance and SLAs
Review governance models, reporting structures, escalation paths, and measurable service-level agreements. Enterprise-scale programs require transparency and accountability. - Cloud Platform Expertise
Verify certifications, architectural depth, and proven delivery across major cloud ecosystems. Platform fluency should extend beyond migration to cloud-native optimization. - Post-Modernization Optimization
Determine whether the provider supports continuous improvement, cost optimization, performance tuning, and operational resilience after migration milestones are achieved.
A structured evaluation framework helps enterprises select a partner capable of delivering sustainable transformation rather than a one-time migration exercise.
Cloud Modernization Benefits
Cloud modernization enables enterprises to move beyond infrastructure upgrades toward measurable business transformation.
By aligning technology with strategic priorities, it improves agility, resilience, cost efficiency, and long-term innovation capacity.
- Reduce Cloud Expenses: A mismatch between the cloud service and the lift and shift of applications or databases can increase expenditure. Furthermore, the legacy application comes with its own set of talent availability issues. As a result, fixing and maintaining these critical dependent services can be expensive. These difficulties are eliminated with the help of cloud modernization.
- Reliable Systems: Modernized databases and applications have in-built cloud capabilities, allowing them to leverage the high-availability infrastructure, which increases their reliability. Although a lift-and-shift cloud migration may be beneficial, it is not as effective as cloud-first or cloud-native software. This change significantly impacts your organization, allowing you to remain competitive.
- Improved Scalability: Since the legacy application was not designed for cloud scale, it may encounter numerous issues following migration. When your organization’s IT or application ecosystem expands, you will also need a solution to keep up. Modernized cloud solutions give you more space without increasing your resource requirements.
- Moving to Purpose-built Databases: Cloud platforms provide a great deal of flexibility when it comes to choosing different databases for your systems. Furthermore, you can always experiment with ones that excel in cloud environments. By migrating to databases best suited to your cloud use cases, you can pave the path for exceptional performance gains.
Choosing the Right Cloud Platform
When customers choose a cloud provider, they may feel limited by the similarity of services offered by each provider. However, it is crucial to ensure that the chosen provider has the necessary technical skills and platform alignment, including security, performance, reliability, experience, and reputation. Other considerations include budget, project scale and size, and compatibility with the technology stack.
Some cloud providers go beyond the usual offerings and provide innovative use cases enabled by Machine Learning (ML), AI, and infrastructure for mobile apps. These providers are at the forefront of technology and can help expand your vision of what is possible. Let us examine some of the major cloud providers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first to enter the cloud services market. According to experts, AWS is the gold standard of cloud service excellence in terms of the number of products and customers. It offers a range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that are classified into the following categories: computing, database and storage, and networking.
AWS enables a smooth and flexible data collection flow using serverless services such as Amazon SQS Queues, Amazon Kinesis Streams, and AWS Lambda Functions. It also allows organizations to choose their web application platform, programming languages, operating system, and database, among other elements, as required. Organizations can utilize AWS management tools like AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch to monitor resource usage conveniently. At the same time, AWS Config can be employed for managing resource inventory and the modifications made to them. Amazon’s data centers are the largest among the three major cloud providers and operate in 99 availability zones.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a platform for developing, deploying, and managing various services and applications using Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure’s offerings include computing, networking, data management databases, and performance services. Azure Site Recovery enables enterprises to perform site-to-site replication and data recovery to VMs hosted on Azure.
Furthermore, Azure ExpressRoute facilitates data connectivity to Azure through a private link and eliminates internet dependency. As a result, there is more security, greater reliability, and lower latency. Azure also offers extensive networking capabilities, including support for multiple site-to-site connections to virtual networks and connecting them across different regions. Azure also provides the lowest on-demand and discounted instance pricing. Additionally, specialist developers may write, test, and deploy algorithms using Azure Machine Learning Studio.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is an appealing alternative to AWS and Azure because of its user-friendly interface, reduced rates, and flexible computing options. It uses full-scale encryption of all data and communication channels, including the traffic between data centers. Google Cloud competes with AWS in areas such as instant payment configurability, privacy, traffic security, Machine Learning capabilities, and cost-efficiency.
Hexaware’s Cloud Modernization Services Help Accelerate Your Cloud Journey
Hexaware’s proprietary application cloud modernization platform, Amaze®, is designed for enterprise-level Java, .NET, and TIBCO BusinessWorks applications running on Oracle, DB2, or Sybase databases. Amaze®’s rapid application assessment of complex monolithic applications and built-in cloud transformation engine for code refactoring based on the target architecture can help you save time and money on cloud migration. Aside from real-time evaluations, it reduces initial manual effort and accelerates time-to-market.
Additionally, based on an in-depth assessment of your on-premises tech stack, you gain clarity on the most suitable target architecture and phased modernization plan. Cloud specialists guide the modernization process, while built-in automation and source-target mapping features enable up to 70% of modernization and transformation operations to be automated. The focus remains on converting legacy applications into macro and microservice APIs and migrating them to public, private, or hybrid cloud environments without disrupting core business functionality. This also includes database migration from licensed to open-source technologies across cloud service models.
The modernization approach decouples applications into web front-end and service back-end components for greater flexibility and scalability. The Amaze®-led automation strategy enables up to a 50% reduction in re-platforming effort and cost, supports cross-platform deployment, and improves performance with enhanced scalability.
Enterprise Capability Highlights
- End-to-end modernization across assessment, migration, refactoring, and optimization
- Automation-led execution to reduce manual effort and improve predictability
- Cross-industry experience managing complex enterprise application portfolios
- Integrated governance frameworks aligned to security, compliance, and operational controls
