Legacy apps hold back enterprises from seeing digital transformation benefits

A new study from cloud services company 2nd Watch finds 80 percent of enterprises continue to run at least one-quarter of their business workloads and applications on-premises.

This is holding them back from reaping digital transformation benefits such as lowered cost of ownership, better agility and fewer risks. 33 percent of respondents say their biggest challenge in modernizing legacy applications is a lack of skills or expertise, while 26 percent struggle most with lack of budget and investment, and 25 percent with outdated processes and tools.

Although organizations are moving their legacy apps to the cloud, this doesn't provide companies with the highly sought-after benefits of lowering their total cost of ownership, increasing agility, and decreasing risk. Applications need to be modernized and optimized for the cloud as well.

2nd Watch's survey looks to understand where they see the application migration and modernization industry heading, what they prioritize, and how they will focus on application modernization to ensure a digital-first strategy that accelerates digital transformation.

More than three-quarters (79 percent) of respondents say that legacy applications are hindering their organization's digital transformation initiatives. 52 percent are running more than half of their workloads and applications on-premises.

Reducing technical debt is ranked the number one driver for cloud migration, followed by reducing time to market/product agility and reducing costs.

While 91 percent of respondents agree or strongly agree that application modernization plays a critical role in their organization's adaptability to rapidly changing business conditions, only 11 percent have made significant progress, and almost all (99 percent) have failed to meet all of their initial modernization objectives.

"The data mirrors what we're hearing from our customers, which is that digital transformation is a top priority and most companies still have a long way to go in terms of migrating their workloads and applications to the cloud," says Chris Whaley, EVP of cloud solutions and sales at 2nd Watch. "As companies continue this journey, their biggest challenge will be finding people with the advanced cloud skills to help them. Partners with the requisite experience and resources will continue to be crucial to this process."

You can get the full study on the 2nd Watch site.

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