What is IT modernization?

At the most straightforward level, IT modernization is the process of updating some or all of an organization’s outdated IT infrastructure to better support current and future business goals. This may seem simple, but, since both software and hardware can become outdated quickly, modernization is a constant and complex process for companies both large and small across many different industries.

A few core concepts and challenges of IT modernization include:

• Technical debt: A large part of IT modernization is alleviating technical debt, where an older approach—such as a telecommunications provider continuing to use non-disaggregated software, or a financial services provider running processes on an old mainframe—is less cost efficient than a more modern approach. The challenge with technical debt is balancing the upfront costs of transitioning to a new approach with the savings from using the more modern approach.
• Institutional knowledge: Even if legacy systems are running well, the IT professionals who are trained to keep them running may be aging into retirement. Since those legacy systems aren’t being newly implemented anymore, tracking down replacement skills for those systems can be a challenge.
• Modern agility: Some legacy systems might provide a stable business environment, but don’t allow for the ability to rapidly scale as modern systems do. Legacy systems, even ones that work as intended, can’t take full advantage of cloud-native and hybrid cloud environments.

IT modernization processes are different for every organization and every industry, because the legacy systems each company uses are unique to their own growth journey. For example, for telecommunications service providers, outdated IT systems are a critical issue that could impact their survival in today's market.

These providers have a complex and inflexible IT architecture due to a variety of disconnected technologies and processes that have evolved over many decades. Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures have only added to this complexity, making it difficult to provide the agility and capabilities needed to maximize the value of new technologies such as cloud-native applications and 5G networks.

Additionally, many of these outdated technologies are still providing vital services, and seasoned engineers are slowly approaching retirement, creating a knowledge gap that cannot be filled.

To compete successfully in today's market, service providers need to modernize their IT systems. However, IT modernization is not just about replacing old technology with new technology. It is also an opportunity to build a solid foundation for a sustainable digital transformation of the business. IT modernization is essential for telcos to remain competitive and adapt to the changing market environment.

Modernizing IT infrastructure is a critical step towards staying competitive in today's market. However, since every organization has different technical debt, IT modernization doesn’t have one single set of steps that guarantees success. That said, there are a few core principles to keep in mind when putting together an IT modernization initiative. Here are a few steps to begin your IT modernization:

Analyze your legacy system: First, conduct a careful analysis of your legacy systems and applications to identify which ones are still required to run day-to-day business. Interruptions should be avoided, so consider the options available for legacy system modernization. This could include adding new capabilities, refactoring the system for a full refresh, or retiring and replacing the system with a completely new solution.

Simplify your infrastructure platform: To provide infrastructure to end-users faster (without sacrificing security, ease of management, or flexibility to adopt new technologies), simplify your infrastructure platform by starting with the operating system (OS). Standardizing the OS and automation platforms allows you to consistently operate and manage your workloads anywhere you run them. Platform simplification can help you:

• Improve current and future deployments, including cloud, on-premise, containers, or the edge of the network, with increased consistency across your IT environment and portability of workloads across platforms.
• Establish a strong security posture by building on a trustworthy platform.
• Close skills gaps, gain operational efficiencies, and free up time to focus on innovation by using a consistent platform and tools.

By following these steps, you can work toward a successful IT modernization and build a solid foundation for a sustainable digital transformation.

Once your organization has highlighted problem areas and starts modernizing their IT environment, there are a few specific overall strategies to help implement modern technology. 

Updating security during IT modernization

As you enact your IT modernization plan, it's important to consider security capabilities that can help you protect your systems and data. Here are some security capabilities to look for:

• Easy patching of systems: This allows your organization to quickly secure systems and follow compliance requirements by regularly patching multiple systems at once.
• Task automation: By automating common tasks such as provisioning, patching, and content management, you can free up your teams to focus on strategic projects.
• System-level risk analysis: Examine higher-level analyses of risks affecting each system, along with prescriptive analytics and remediation guidelines.
• Vulnerable system identification: Identify how many and which systems in your environment are affected by security, configuration, and performance risks.
• Organizational-level risk assessment: This is a higher-level view that helps you automatically assess both potential and active risks to your organization.
• Quick vulnerability remediation: This helps you automatically remediate known security vulnerabilities to reduce your risk of and exposure to breaches.
• Security and compliance reporting: This can generate detailed, customized reports to keep stakeholders updated and to ease security compliance audits. This is especially important in industries highly regulated by federal agencies.
• Automated security control application and maintenance: When you scan systems and apply security controls in an automated way, it can help simplify compliance with both regulatory and corporate policies.

As organizations continue to face increasing pressure to innovate and streamline their operations, hyper automation has emerged as a key objective. Hyper automation refers to automating as many processes as possible and the integration of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), with traditional automation tools to create a more comprehensive and efficient automation framework.

By extending automation beyond isolated task-based systems and implementing it across organizational boundaries and network domains, service providers can significantly increase operational efficiency. For example, automating the deployment of hundreds of network functions and managing thousands of network devices can help bring new services to market faster and reduce operational expenses (OpEx). In fact, automating processes end-to-end across organizations can not only reduce OpEx, but also shorten the time from order to delivery, and ultimately shorten the time to revenue.

However, achieving hyper automation requires a more holistic approach to automation that integrates with the tools and technologies service providers are already using. A hardened automation platform can provide this integration, enabling service providers to automate processes across private and public cloud environments, from the network edge to the core. By doing so, businesses can achieve a more scalable and flexible automation framework that can adapt fast to changing business requirements.

Hyper automation represents the future of operations, providing a more comprehensive and efficient automation framework that can help providers achieve their business goals. By implementing a hardened automation platform that integrates with existing tools and technologies, organizations can streamline their operations, reduce costs, and increase revenue.

As businesses undergo digital transformation, they often turn to hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud for their public cloud needs. Organizations already utilize multiple public cloud services for their infrastructure requirements, whether through strategic planning, shadow IT, or a combination of both, due to the on-demand availability of infrastructure resources and consumption-based pricing offered by hyperscalers. However, in order to effectively integrate hyperscalers into an overall strategy, CIOs and other business leaders must carefully evaluate whether:  

• Hyperscaler infrastructures deliver the requirements of their applications and services.
• Their business can actually reap the perceived cost and agility advantages from public cloud services after adding storage, networking, or other services.
• Any strategic assets, like sensitive business data, should migrate or stay on private cloud.
• They can easily move workloads back to the private cloud or to another public cloud.
• They can optimize the use of hyperscaler services to facilitate more agile operations and culture with DevOps and DevSecOps methodologies and deliver more value to customers.

According to Red Hat’s The State of Enterprise Open Source report, in-house skills gaps continue to be a major roadblock for digital transformation and IT modernization. This is because several of the key skills for running a modern IT environment, such as expertise with Kubernetes, are missing from an organization.

Having access to a strong ecosystem of partner organizations and tools ensures you can quickly augment staff and development resources to take advantage of modern cloud-native benefits. 

As companies continue to evolve their agile processes and integration, they must prioritize cultural change. Agile development cycles require iterative, continuous, and scalable approaches that call for new planning and execution methods. However, the cultural changes required to support this new way of working can be challenging for any organization.

Increased transparency, collaboration, inclusivity, and adaptability are crucial for achieving success in today’s interconnected and digital business world. To enable these cultural changes, organizations can leverage DevOps, agile, and cloud-based computing methods, along with rapid integration of data and applications.

Start with leadership and educate IT teams on the benefits of agile methodology to the organization’s strategic goals and digital journey. Then, take on small, well-defined projects that can demonstrate the approach's advantages. These successes will help increase support across the organization for process change.

Any IT modernization initiative will struggle to succeed if the organization and CIOs implementing it do not adopt agile processes and methodologies.

Red Hat offers a range of open-source solutions that support, integrate, and complement each other to help service providers establish a solid IT foundation. This foundation provides tools for automating, adapting, focusing on security, and enabling a hybrid cloud environment for flexibility and application and workload portability.

The Red Hat suite of tools makes it easy for developers to accelerate their application development and innovation processes, designed for simplicity to enhance business and operational agility. Alongside this, security is a top priority. Red Hat solutions give organizations tools to help reduce the risk of security breaches and simplify compliance with required regulations.

Red Hat solutions solve IT modernization challenges

Modernizing IT with Red Hat solutions helps solve several key challenges, including:

• Simplifying an organization's IT platform for a more consistent experience.
• Offering an integrated architecture to enable cloud-native development.
• Providing an IT automation platform that enables IT infrastructure automation at scale to decrease risk through consistent and compliant configuration and environment management.
• Simplifying the migration of IT workloads to the cloud.
• Assisting organizations in fully integrated security measures throughout their IT infrastructure and development stack and lifecycle.
• Offering extensive training paths to prepare teams to work more effectively in modern IT environments.

Key Red Hat solutions that help implement an IT modernization initiative:

• Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® and Red Hat® OpenShift® provide the foundation to begin your journey through IT modernization.
• Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform allows you to automate IT tasks and gain valuable insights through API-centric solutions.
• Red Hat Training and Certificationbridge the skills gap in-house developers may have through partnerships and training paths.