App Modernisation | Webinar | Final Thoughts

 

Top Five Tips from Our Experts

1. Assess
2. Rationalise
3. Data first
4. Automate
5. Instrument
6. Appropriate digital assessment

The more in-depth to do your assessment, the better decisions you can make.

The Five Rs

The second is to rationalise the use of the five R’s. Look at rehosting, rearchitecting, refactoring, rebuilding and replacing.

Data first

And the third is, of course, doing your data first. Move your data with your app. But move your data first. It’s easier to move.

If you’re running SQL Server, the database Migration Assistant is an awesome tool to push your data and review whether you can do that. So it’s going to again come back to assessment.

Automate

Then, the last year would be to automate, automate, automate.

Push everything in DevOps pipelines. If you don’t want to use Azure DevOps, use GitLab. Or whatever you use – GitHub actions are also very cool. Use whatever you can to automate, automate, automate.

Instrument

Then, finally, instrument and make your code observable. Making your code observable is the foundation of making sure that you have a reliable and secure system.

And I’m also saying secure because instrumentation can give you things like if you look at a defender, Azure Defender told people they had been hacked on the Salari Gate Hack. And the Sunburst malware, because it actually showed them that these accounts are trying to get access privileges that they’re not supposed to.

Skill Sets in IT: The Importance of Adapting

Skill set in IT, right? It’s a big thing. So, let’s talk about skill sets. 

So, I used to be a SharePoint Architect. So I could walk into a big bank and let me build your SharePoint farm. Right, and that was my stuff, right? So Index Mirroring, User Profile Services Fail Over, Sequel, Up the wazoo around clustering and Availability Grouping and all of that. Windows workflow foundation. I’ve got a 10-server Farm. I would beat my chest and say I’m a SharePoint architect. That role does not exist today. It’s gone.

Same as Exchange people, right? I don’t have to build an Exchange server. I go, spin up an Office 365 tenant, give it a domain and 43 minutes later, everything works.

Adapt your skill set to what happens in the Cloud. It’s really about transitioning your current skill set into what happens in the cloud. But if you go to Azure, you go to portal.azure.com, and you go look at the number of blades that are available and the amount of options that you can click on. There are over 400 options in Azure.

That’s more than any services that you can run on-prem. So if you need to cross-skill and move your skill set from worrying about a piece of tin running or that backup tape – go to the cloud, and you still worry about things, but what you’re worrying about is different.

An Example: SRV

So, think about SRV, right? You ensure that the environment can scale when hitting more than 4o00 concurrent connections. Elasticity. We talked about elasticity.

And now you start worrying about trend mapping for the next year so that you can scale. In the old days, you’d have to go back to your CFO and say, “Hey, I need 3 Million Rand over the next year because I’m running out of tin. Running out of disk space”. You don’t run out of that now.

So, think about the headaches. Look at the problems on-premise and see the value of moving to the cloud because those problems disappear. It doesn’t mean that you become obsolete. It just means that your skill set changes. And that’s what Microsoft Learn is all about.

 

Use Free Learning Resources

So also, just on that, I mean, all of the cloud providers realise that this is one of the biggest challenges not only to transition skill, so there’s a tonne of free learning online. All of them have a lot of free learning, and it’s about transitioning to the cloud as a business, as an IT department and as a technical resource as a technologist.