Your Guide to Application Modernization With HCL Informix®

The imperative to modernize extends across all aspects of the IT landscape. Companies face an urgent need to enhance business agility, break down organizational silos, accelerate innovation, reduce time-to-market, optimize costs, and transform their IT workforce. Achieving these goals requires strategic decisions about how and where to modernize. Your organization needs to leverage the full spectrum of available tools and services and rethink its approach to developing, deploying, operating, and maintaining applications.

When done right, application modernization can transform your company and unlock new revenue sources with new or expanded use cases. But this does not happen overnight. It takes a concerted, organization-wide effort to rethink legacy systems, adopt hybrid architectures, and embrace DevOps best practices. You can achieve greater agility, scalability, and cost savings by gradually migrating applications to microservices, optimizing infrastructure, and automating deployment pipelines.

Create Your Application Modernization Plan

Insufficient research, discovery, and planning is the most common modernization mistake. Often, businesses will wait to modernize their applications until something breaks. But you don’t have to learn the hard way. It just takes a little planning.

Define Your Strategic Goals

What “success” looks like may differ across your organization. Maybe you’re most concerned with maintaining the stability and performance of your existing infrastructure, but your research and development teams may want to test and explore new technologies and concepts. Establishing your goals and objectives and separating the “must-haves” from the “nice-to-haves” is essential. Make sure to run the goals up to a leadership level to set expectations.

Audit Your Applications

Conduct thorough discovery by auditing your existing applications and determining which level of modernization is appropriate for each. Compare applications to current standards and best practices in security, availability, scalability, infrastructure automation, monitoring, proactive failure prevention, and disaster recovery. Use the audit to determine what types of applications you want to migrate, enhance, re-build, or build from scratch.

Determine Strategic Importance

Not all applications are equally important to your organization’s success. You will want to modernize your applications with the highest business-criticality first or those that best align with your business strategy. Those could be the applications that drive the most revenue or the ones where security and data privacy are of utmost importance. Rank these applications and work with one of our Actian partners or specialists to devise a unique modernization strategy for each mission-critical application.

Establish Your Data Landscape

Choose an architecture (cloud, on-prem, hybrid), operating system (Windows, Linux, etc.), and data management services to combine with your updated HCL Informix® instance. Devise a comprehensive architecture diagram, including critical integrations and connectors, to map any potential vulnerabilities that must be addressed.

Get Ready for a Cultural Shift

Modernization is a team sport. While your team will be familiar with your HCL Informix database and tools like HCL Informix 4GL and the Informix Warehouse Accelerator, there may be a steep learning curve to managing a cloud-native or hybrid application. Additionally, there is a whole host of tools, data warehouses, and microservices available from cloud providers that your team may have to learn. Devise a training program uniquely for your database administrators, developers, architects, IT, and any other role that will be impacted, so they can proficiently manage your apps once migrated and modernized.

For more best-practice approaches to modernizing your Informix applications, download our free eBook.

> Get the eBook

For additional best practices, or to customize a strategy for your organization, connect with one of our Actian partners or specialists.

About Actian

Actian makes data easy. We deliver cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises data solutions that simplify how people connect, manage, and analyze data. We transform business by enabling customers to make confident, data-driven decisions that accelerate their organization’s growth. Our data platform integrates seamlessly, performs reliably, and delivers at industry-leading speeds. Learn more about Actian, a division of HCLSoftware: www.actian.com.

Informix® is a trademark of IBM Corporation in at least one jurisdiction and is used under license.

About Nick Johnson

Nick Johnson is the Senior Product Marketing Manager for HCL Informix, Actian Ingres, and Partners. At Actian, he brings these transactional databases and partnerships to life with highly targeted messaging, positioning, case studies, content, and more. Prior to Actian, Nick worked in Product Marketing across several organizations including Neo4j, Microsoft, SAS, and Orbit. Nick holds a Master’s degree in International Development from Sciences Po and Bachelor’s degrees in International Studies and Swedish from the University of Washington.