Note
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories.
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try changing directories.
Cloud modernization is the practice of improving existing cloud-based workloads to better meet business. It aligns workloads with cloud best practices, without adding new features. This framework provides an end-to-end guide for organizations to plan and execute modernization across all their workload teams.
Modernization success begins with organizational preparation. This stage ensures everyone understands what modernization means for your company. You also need to evaluate if your teams have the needed skills and identify which applications to modernize first.
Define modernization for your organization
Establish a common definition of modernization. Cloud modernization improves how existing workloads work without building new features. Typical modernization activities include replatforming (moving components to a new hosting environment), refactoring (optimizing or restructuring code), and rearchitecting (redesigning the system’s structure) within the cloud. Modernization excludes net-new features or complete rewrites for new capabilities.
Communicate the definition of modernization. Share this definition with all relevant teams and stakeholders. Ensure that project managers, engineers, product owners, and executives understand and agree. A unified understanding prevents misalignment.
Create shared responsibility across teams. Modernization requires collaboration between development, operations, security, and architecture teams. Each team contributes different expertise to modernization success. Establish regular communication and joint decision-making processes. Avoid siloed work that creates integration problems or missed requirements. Assign clear roles while maintaining cross-team coordination.
Assess modernization readiness and skills
Evaluate your modernization skills. Before embarking on modernization, assess whether your team has the necessary skills and tools to modernize successfully. Key areas to evaluate include:
Skill area Assessment questions Cloud services knowledge Are engineers familiar with relevant Azure services that you might use during modernization? DevOps and CI/CD Do you have mature continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines in place? Can you automate testing and deployments with infrastructure as code? Modern architecture patterns Does the team understand microservices, containerization, and other modern cloud-native concepts that could be part of refactoring or rearchitecting? Monitoring and automation Are your monitoring, logging, and automation tools sufficient to support more advanced cloud operations post-modernization? Identify any skills gaps and create a plan to fill them. You could train existing staff (Azure certifications, cloud architecture workshops) or bring in new hires/contractors with specific expertise. Skills often matter more than the specific technologies. A well-trained team executes a modernization more smoothly than a team learning on the fly.
Engage external expertise if needed. If your team lacks experience in critical areas, bring in Microsoft or a Microsoft partner. External experts can validate your modernization strategy, recommend appropriate tools, and help establish realistic timelines.
Prioritize what workloads to modernize
Not every workload should be modernized. Use a structured approach to decide which workloads to modernize first. The key is to weigh business value against technical risk, and identify any urgent triggers that force action.
Assess business value. Make a list of the candidate workloads and rate each by its importance to the business. You can use a high/medium/low ranking or a numeric score for business value. The more critical the workload is to revenue, customer satisfaction, or operations, the higher its business value score:
Business value category Examples Revenue or mission-critical Systems that process sales transactions or support core business functions (downtime directly means lost money) Customer experience Systems that customers or clients directly interact with (performance and reliability affect satisfaction) Compliance or regulatory Systems subject to strict regulations or security requirements (failure to update could pose legal risks) Broad internal dependency Platforms widely used by employees or other systems (if it's slow or unstable, it drags down productivity across the organization) Assess technical risk. Independently, evaluate the technical state of each system. Essentially, figure out how much it needs modernization. Rank technical risk/need as high, medium, or low for each workload. Signs of high technical risk or debt include:
Technical risk category Examples Technical debt Legacy code with workarounds, outdated frameworks, hard-to-modify architecture Outdated technology Operating systems or databases nearing end-of-support, deprecated programming languages High maintenance effort Frequent manual interventions, rising support costs, complex troubleshooting processes Performance and reliability issues Chronic downtime, slow response times, inability to handle load spikes Limited scalability Architecture that requires major rework to grow, manual scaling processes Identify urgent modernization triggers. Certain events can suddenly change a workload’s priority, even if it wasn’t top of the list initially. Watch for these triggers that make modernization urgent:
Trigger category Examples Security vulnerabilities Newly discovered security holes in legacy components, outdated encryption protocols, or compliance violations End-of-support deadlines Platform or software losing vendor support within 12 months, old security patches Business growth demands Rapid customer growth exceeding system capacity, new market entry requirements, or integration needs System reliability issues Repeated outages, chronic performance problems, or escalating maintenance costs Prioritize workloads. Combine the business value and technical risk assessments into a simple priority matrix.
Business value Technical risk Modernization priority Action High High Top priority Start modernization now. High return on investment High Low Monitor Delay modernization unless specific business benefits exist Low High Case-by-case Don’t modernize immediately unless there’s a clear benefit Low Low Do nothing Modernization effort here wouldn't be a good use of resources.
Understand how to modernize
Before diving into execution, ensure you and the individual workload teams understand the approaches and best practices for modernization in the cloud.
Use the Azure Well-Architected Framework to spot improvement opportunities.. The Well-Architected Framework (WAF) is a set of best practices across five pillars: Reliability, Security, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, and Performance Efficiency. Conducting a Well-Architected review of your workloads can highlight where they aren't following best practices. Those gaps effectively generate a to-do list for modernization. The bigger or more numerous the gaps, the more pressing the need to modernize that workload. In this way, WAF provides a data-driven roadmap of what to fix.
Enable workload teams to make modernization decisions. The teams who own and run each application day-to-day often have the deepest insight into its pain points and what changes would help. It’s wise to involve these teams in deciding how to modernize their systems. Give them the business context ("we need this system to handle 2x traffic" or "we need to cut its maintenance cost by 30%") and let them propose solutions. Perhaps they know a certain service can be swapped out or which parts of the code are the worst. Provide decision-making authority to these teams for technical choices, within boundaries of budget, timeline, and overall architectural standards. Establish regular check-ins to ensure their plans align with broader organizational goals.