Why Your Application Modernization Strategy Demands a Modern Storage Architecture

By Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Director, Arcserve India

Today, your company may, like many others, be pursuing application modernization strategies that replace older software with innovative approaches like new languages, frameworks, and infrastructure platforms. The numbers bear this out, with the application modernization services market projected to grow from $11.4 billion in 2020 to $24.8 billion by 2025.

Companies are eagerly adopting these cutting-edge strategies, from containerization to virtualization and low-code to no-code software development. The reasons are simple: They can transform your operations by helping you extract the maximum value from digital technologies like AI and big data.

But as you look to implement an application modernization strategy, you need to understand that planning your storage architecture is a critical component as you transition from your legacy IT environment. As you shift to a modernized application architecture, a bulletproof data backup and recovery strategy is imperative.

That’s because should your company lose any mission-critical data at any stage of the development or transition process, your modernization strategy is at risk of failure, and your company could be exposed to increased risks.

Protect Your Investments With a Plan

The reality is that without a good data storage and recovery strategy, your business could lose its investments outright. Many large companies starting their application modernization journey wonder if they’re entirely covered. You need to recognize that this isn’t just a matter of optimizing your application development and deployment. It’s also about implementing robust security controls and data recovery plans to ensure a smooth transition.

A new report from research firm IDC outlines the challenges you may face when deploying modernization strategies like containerized applications. The report also lists the benefits you might realize—as opposed to those you might expect—from these efforts.

Many companies that embraced modernization are rolling back some of those changes and repatriating their data because they didn’t fully anticipate the challenges and impacts ahead. Essentially, the time, effort, and investment required to transition to these new technology stacks are not always bearing fruit. That’s forcing some companies to return to their original architectures and traditional deployment methods.

Data Storage: An Essential Element of Modernization

As companies gain experience with application modernization technologies, they quickly learn that some fall short regarding data storage. Why? Well, for one thing, a container architecture like Kubernetes is exceptionally fluid and dynamic.

Depending on the developers’ goals and specifications, these containers are quickly spun up and just as quickly spun down—they are temporary, with a relatively short lifespan. At the same time, storage, by definition, is permanent. That means data storage can’t live by the same rules as containers that are constantly being created and destroyed.

Data protection is increasingly important as more enterprises embark on their modernization journeys. Already, many organizations are encountering unexpected changes to their data during migration and deployment. As more of these modern technologies and techniques take hold, more and more data will be created that must be backed up and stored.

That’s why data backup is now a front-burner issue, as companies realize their data needs to be better managed and protected now and into the future.

Put Your Backup Architecture In Place Before Modernization

Application modernization depends on visibility into your data. You need to know where it is physically stored, how it is structured, and who has access to it. You need to balance the benefits of modernization against the growing threats of malware, ransomware, and other cyberattacks, too.

Wherever your company is on its modernization journey, you must recognize that things can go wrong. That’s why it’s crucial to have a backup and secondary immutable storage architecture during this transition. Then, if anything breaks, you can always return to your system’s original state and keep everything running smoothly.

To learn more about how Arcserve can help you achieve your application modernization strategy, talk to an Arcserve technology partner.