Cloud - accelerate your journey

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In a world where applications are critical to how an organization functions, and serves its employees and customers, it’s important to step back, take stock, and think things through properly.

That can be difficult. Disruption is always around the corner. A competitor always seems to be going faster than you. Technology is constantly changing. Industry forecasters are forever reimagining 

the future. The needs of your people are evolving. Everything seems to be shifting under your feet.

But there’s a well-known African proverb that sums up our approach: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together.’ Working with a partner always pays dividends. Why? Because it helps you think through what needs to be changed, and what should stay the same.

From Multi-Cloud Transformation to Cloud Native Development, DevOps Automation to Legacy Modernization via APIs and Data Driven Processes, all are subjects that will impact your organization in one way 

or another.

Our approach is a human one. That’s why we put the emphasis on ‘thinking’ – and we apply that thinking to real-world issues and objectives. It’s not the technology that counts, it’s what it allows people to accomplish.

Use hybrid and multi-cloud to digitalise core processing progressively

Only a relatively short time ago there was a model for enterprise IT that was pretty much standard: one vendor providing a single platform; usually via an on-premise or virtual environment, on which businesses developed and deployed their services. 

Then, along came the cloud and a host of providers making their own tools and services readily available from public platforms to create a new, hybrid IT model. 

Very quickly, providers started to issue an ever growing number of productivity tools for faster deployment of existing applications, or SaaS 

services that made it easier for companies to begin using cloud based applications. 

However, choice, can bring its own challenges, as we’ve seen in other markets where different products from different providers sometimes 

throw up problems of compatibility. 

In this instance, that challenge is to integrate applications running on different cloud vendor platforms, offered through different channels 

and with different assurances and SLAs, so they work seamlessly with one another, and with often fragile on-premise legacy platforms.

If you’re managing an eco-system of applications on several platforms, from several different providers, you may have come across such problems already. And it’s to overcome them, and to integrate applications more effectively, that we developed a number of services that run across and facilitate multi-cloud environments.

‘Born in the cloud’, or Cloud Native Development’, is a method of building and managing responsive, scalable and robust applications in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment. This approach is quickly 

gaining traction with businesses keen to benefit from its flexibility, speed and low set-up and running costs.

What makes it so different to traditional application development? Simple. It all happens entirely in the cloud, as a marriage between application development and infrastructure as code. 

That makes cloud native applications incredibly resilient (because they don’t rely on a single, critical hard drive or server), and incredibly ubiquitous. In other words, they can be accessed anywhere, by anyone with the right privileges, on any operating system or device

It has to be said, however, that cloud native development can be a challenge. Traditional, process-heavy organisations that still lean on 

monolith applications may find it hard to make the necessary adjustments to take its agile, iterative and ‘fail fast’ methodology 

on board. 

If they are determined to become more competitive, if their market share is under threat or if they need to get services to market quickly to protect their profits, then the move from heritage to microservices 

architecture via cloud native development is essential.

For one of our UK customers, reliant on outdated legacy systems and technology, any change to operating systems or online customer services required updates to huge amounts of source code that could take months to deliver. 

Legacy applications are fragile, prone to failure and open to attack. The languages they are written in are outmoded and unsupported. They are slow, monolithic and inefficient compared to the modern, agile alternatives competitors and challengers of most organizations are 

adopting.

To stay competitive and continue offering their customers market leading services, organizations can do one of three things: 

• Redevelop their legacy applications from the ground up, using today’s developer tools – time consuming and expensive. 
•  Find replacements that most closely fit their enterprise objectives among the many widely available cloud or SaaS products - almost always an exercise in compromise
• Modernise the applications they are already familiar with and make them fit for purpose in an environment other than the mainframe they were designed for - by far the most efficient option.

Misthos Legacy Modernisation services help businesses modernise their applications by taking the most useful parts of their old IT applications and updating them to work in today’s digital environments.

If you’re facing the challenge of modernising your legacy applications, the first thing we’ll do is carry out an assessment to help us understand your IT ecosystem. What applications are you working with at the moment? Can they be modernised? 

If they can, is it right for your business to do so? 

If a straight replacement rather than a modernisation will be the better choice to move you on in your applications transformation journey, we’ll tell you. Our first responsibility is to make sure you’re following the right path, at the right time for your business. 

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for one device, network or application to communicate with another and access data from it. This could be customer account details, maps, music, bus times, recipes… whatever the API has been designed to ask for and share. 

APIs are used by every kind of business to make life easier for their customers. Additional APIs are used in their internal IT systems, helping automate processes, troubleshoot problems and generally keep things running smoothly. Little of what goes on in the digital world today would be possible without them.

Like any tech that enables faster, more efficient processes, APIs can’t simply be ‘plugged in’ and left to get on with the job. There are still some challenges that any business considering integrating them into their IT systems needs to address. 

Careful thought is needed over exactly how APIs will be used and what tasks you will be asking them to perform. Because they are relatively easy to build and operate, some businesses make the mistake of integrating many more APIs than they actually need, so managing and monitoring them effectively becomes a problem in itself.

By working with Misthos API specialists, you can make the most of our advanced API integration resources to accelerate your progress through 

one of the most important stages of your digital transformation journey.

Among the critical skills our teams bring to the process is the ability to integrate legacy applications to the wider system environment.