Applications are the engines that drive your business. From web experiences, to employee management portals, to inventory and order fulfillment tools, and beyond – business apps are critical to your customer engagement and operational effectiveness. But an ecosystem of legacy apps creates challenges and risks. Keeping your code base and data secure, scaling to meet variable demand, and launching new apps can be streamlined with cloud app modernization.
Microsoft
Beyond stability, scalability, and security, app modernization is key to gaining competitive advantages. By providing innovative, fast-to-market apps, your business can more effectively respond to new market opportunities, gain efficiencies, and engage customers. An app platform in the cloud frees you from the constraints of your hardware resources so your business can move at the speed of innovation it needs to.
We’ve identified five key competitive advantages of modernizing apps with Azure Platform Services that are shared across many customers:
1. Reduce IT spend. Customer evidence and research show that Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) both saves costs and drives revenue gains. You no longer need to invest in data center costs and capital expenses. With managed PaaS, Azure keeps platform current and updated, applies security patches, and takes care of network configuration so developers can focus on building apps. You can also deliver more reliable, scalable apps at a lower cost: Scale capacity, deploy and retire resources dynamically to meet your customer needs during peak seasons, without risking overprovisioning unused capacity.
Through customer interviews and data aggregation, The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure PaaS commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in 2022 showed that Microsoft Azure PaaS has the following three-year financial impact:
- 228% return on investment (ROI)
- $30.0 million in net present value (NPV)
- Reduced application-development-related infrastructure costs by 40%
- Only 15 months to payback on modernization investments
In Forrester’s composite organization, the financial benefits realized with Azure PaaS included $2.8 million in revenue gains from faster application production, $7.2 million in application development efficiencies, and $19.1 million in related infrastructure cost savings.
There are significant savings in regards to skills and staffing as well. You can mitigate staff limitations by using readily available technologies and tools that facilitate migration and modernization. And many of your team’s existing platforms, tools, and coding skills are easily extended to the cloud. Your team can use their time more effectively and efficiently by focusing on app development, rather than IT or security management.
NBA accelerates modern app time to market to ramp up fans’ excitement
The NBA’s cloud-first strategy using Azure gives them the flexibility and horsepower to quickly iterate enhanced functionalities and increase efficiency throughout the organization. They’ve seen a significantly simpler app coding process using low-code and no-code scenarios, allowing the development group to experiment and test new features in their Azure “playground.” The NBA used to launch an app called the Referee Engagement and Performance System (REPS), which uses actionable data via video captures and machine learning to improve the consistency and fairness of referee calls. REPS was so groundbreaking it was named the Capgemini Innovation of the Year at the 2022 Sports Technology Awards. They also developed the mobile-first employee app, NBAOne, consolidating over 50 apps and giving employees a more efficient, single sign-on (SSO) experience when managing their different tasks.
See how they did it
2. Security and performance. For innovation to happen, people must feel safe. Customers reward app reliability and trust with increased loyalty and stickiness. Modernizing to a secure, high-performing platform ensures that you can support innovation and customer experiences that build loyalty, reduce frustration and risk, and avoid expensive outages or security breaches.
Multi-layered security is foundational to the Azure platform. Microsoft has more than 3,500 cyber security professionals and spends a billion dollars annually on security to help protect, detect, and respond to threats so that you can grow a safe and secure business. When you enable non-security experts to easily incorporate security and compliance in app dev using managed cloud security, you'll not only reduce your security spending, but also increase uptime for your apps.
3. Seamlessly interconnected data and resources. As applications are moved to the cloud, the ability to connect them to databases and other resources becomes a key factor in driving the reduced cost and increased innovation. Enterprise integration helps create a modern application development environment that connects the enterprise to customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Ultimately, exposing the data broadly, securely and at scale makes it possible to derive new insights from data and helping companies thrive in a rapidly changing business environment. This is the power and promise of integration, and why it is a critical success criteria for app modernization.
4. Maximize scale and resilience. The next priority in any cloud first strategy is to keep costs down and maximize revenue with a cloud partner who can keep up with the volume, who is able to scale up and scale down as the demand fluctuates. With Azure, you will power your app on an enterprise grade hosting platform that serves over two million sites, processes over 41 billion requests and over nine trillion SQL database queries per day. With a 99.95 percent enterprise SLA and scale in over 60 regions globally, Azure PaaS ensures your apps are available where and when your customers need them.
5. Innovate faster and get future-ready. With cloud-based managed services, such as Azure App Service, developers spend less time on setup and maintenance of the infrastructure, networking, or even the software licenses. When developers are not spending time on these routine non-productive IT tasks, it creates an environment where innovation can thrive. Developers are most productive when they work with the familiar language of their choice, such as .NET, Java, NodeJS, and Python. Azure App Service helps developers focus on development by minimizing maintenance and maximizing their strengths.
With broad services that are easy to expand and deploy, migrating apps to Azure positions your developer team to be ready to learn and sandbox new apps to take advantage of next horizon opportunities and technologies. The market potential and competitive advantages of machine learning and AI in enterprise apps is boundless: Modernizing apps now enables your team to create rich, more personalized experiences with AI in the future.
Today’s fast-changing markets demand agility to stay competitive. With tightening budgets, staffing constraints, and higher customer expectations, now is the time to invest in cloud app modernization. You can not only optimize costs, increase reliability, and gain customer confidence—but also position your company to grab new opportunities more quickly. Modernizing apps with Azure gets your company to an efficient, scalable, and cost-effective state that empowers innovation and increases developer velocity.
Continue learning about the benefits and opportunities of app modernization:
- Learn more about the 5 Benefits of Migrating Your ASP.NET Apps in this free e-book from Azure.
- Read about five stories of creating better customer experiences in the e-book Modernize Your Customer Web Apps.
- Explore more stories from Azure customers who have been leading change in their own organizations. Whether it is the environmental protection agency of a state in Nigeria, or a dental services startup in Japan, or manufacturing plants in Europe, find businesses like yours that are using Azure’s managed application platform services.
- Watch the on-demand Ignite session “How modernizing enterprise applications gives you a competitive advantage” to hear from Microsoft leaders and the NBA team who use Azure to create dynamic, virtual experiences to enhance the excitement of the NBA both during and beyond game-times.
