IBM targets legacy modernisation with hybrid multicloud

Binning old IT systems

Although CIOs would cherish the idea of binning all their old IT systems and start afresh, the reality is that they will have generation upon generation of IT built on platforms that came from different eras of IT.

“Java is not going away tomorrow,” said Brown. “This is why hybrid, multicloud support is essential.”

While CTOs can continue to invest in building out new technology architecture, said Brown, there is little point in a company spending, say, £6m, to migrate a core system if there is no real business value. “Leave it where it is, and provide access to some of the data it holds,” he said.

Describing a recent IT modernisation project at a financial institute that had an established IT estate comprising 1,200 applications, Brown said the team developed a traffic-light scorecard that enabled people to assess the value of modernisation work against the effort required. To assess the true cost of each application, said Brown, the IBM team used the company’s rate card for developer work to estimate the cost of rebuilding the application.

“We converted low-effort, high-value applications first,” he said. These were the cloud-native applications. There were some applications needed by the business, but modernisation was considered impractical. IBM recommended reducing the extent to which business users could request changes to these.

“We set the to limit three to four major changes, but no application rewrites,” said Brown.

With the middle group of applications, Brown said IBM recommended creating reusable interfaces that could be used to unlock data in these applications in a way that would encourage reuse.

Securing the cloud

Brown is also responsible for IT security. Speaking about the Covid-19 lockdown, he said: “We are being attacked more so than ever.”

Ensuring that hybrid architectures are secure is an important aspect of IBM’s cloud strategy. Any weakness in any system can be exploited, he said, and although there are many benefits in building interfaces that enable modern cloud-native systems to share data with on-premise systems, any connection can be compromised. 

According to the Cloud threat landscape report 2020 from IBM’s X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services, the increase in cloud integration across enterprises and cloud-to-cloud interactions allow potential infections to spread across an enterprise even more quickly than on-premise attacks, and the vast amounts of data running in clouds can also increase the amount of data that threat actors could potentially steal.

The report warned that threat actors took advantage of misconfigured cloud servers to siphon more than one billion records from compromised environments in 2019. Misconfiguration of cloud environments and subsequent data leaks remain one of the greatest sources of record loss across the board and can quickly allow a threat actor to access and steal sensitive information from organisations where that sort of oversight may affect assets in the cloud.

Brown added: “If you don’t have great vulnerability protection, it is like leaving the door open.” He urged IT chiefs to understand the risk posture of their organisations and then put armour plating on everything.