Let’s start with some industry examples where companies across the world have been working with legacy systems as they are critical to their business.

• Mainframe systems that airline companies use for reservations and ticketing systems
• Command-line interface systems based underwriting engine used by insurance companies
• Companies with a core platform on legacy systems (such as COBOL, DB2, etc.) and being used by numerous customers

Many companies are generating good revenues from their operations and supporting the business, but they are missing out on the opportunities for connected data across the ecosystem. The architecture is not supported for enabling seamless data porting, scalability, and speed. Moreover, these systems have a higher cost of operation and high maintenance; and are plagued with usability and security issues. Technological obsolescence and resource scarcity are a few more challenges.

Key challenges with the Legacy systems

Integration issues with other systems: Gone are the days of monolithic architecture; nowadays, solutions are designed to have benefited from multiple systems connected via APIs. Modular and SOA-based architecture are common with scalability benefits and integration with other 3rd party systems. Legacy systems are not designed to integrate with other heterogeneous systems and thus cannot achieve fully integrated systems.

Go to market is slower: Legacy systems usually follow the waterfall model of software delivery, and aligning with the market demand of releasing software features on the fly is not feasible.
These systems are heavily focused on a manual way of working with little or no integrations available for 3rd party build, configuration, and CI/CD tools, causing the entire process to become slow and error-prone.

Misalignment with customer requirements: In the current era of a customer being the king, legacy systems are not synchronized with customers’ needs, especially in terms of flexibility, agility, usability, and customer experience. Legacy systems are still tightly coupled with OS, interface, screen, etc. In the case of growth, these systems cannot scale at the same pace as that of business.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning: Legacy systems are not built to integrate 3rd party data sources and are relatively inflexible. When the world moves towards NoSQL, a flat-file kind of database, legacy systems still run on relational DBMS, slowing the entire operation. Creating intelligent dashboards analytics is a cumbersome task, if not impossible, in these systems. These systems cannot harness the power of AI/ML and achieve predictability and digital transformation benefits.

Human resource challenges: The availability of skilled resources with expertise in legacy systems is seeing a decreasing trend. Universities and institutions, nowadays, focus more on newer technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, Internet of Things, Intelligent Automation, Blockchain, DevOps, etc. This means the engine to produce the team with legacy application skills is dying; moreover, the new generation of engineers is inclined to work on the latest technologies and not on legacy ones.

Compliance and Regulatory requirements: Nowadays, regulatory authorities and governments are very keen on adhering to compliances or heavy penalty is imposed on them. HIPPA, SOX, PCI, GDPR, etc., require your technology to be current and aligned with the regulations. These rules demand specific data to be shared with government bodies, and their implementations/modifications are very time-consuming in legacy systems.

Solutions to legacy technology challenges

We understand the challenges legacy technologies pose, like speed bumps, to leverage data modernization and use it to achieve higher revenue and innovative offerings at the utmost speed to enhance customer experience.

The question is, how can we resolve these legacy issues?

Digital transformation is the key to reducing the risk and unpredictability and improving the customer experience in the current market.
The implementation of Agile and DevOps coupled with a technological revolution comprises cloud, IoT, and AI/ML with enriched and interconnected data that will resolve the issues mentioned above.
Each organization is unique in the context of a market, customers, products, ecosystem, etc., so there can’t be an umbrella approach. The approach must be customized to different companies to harness the full benefits of digital transformation.

How can IGT Solutions help you?

With its technological expertise and process champions, IGT Solutions is well placed to implement methodologies and achieve a faster delivery cycle, cost optimization, and excellent customer experience.
IGT’s expertise in transitioning from legacy to cutting-edge technologies in a phased manner does not disrupt the ongoing business engagements. It can easily transition into the latest technologies fitting to customers’ needs. IGT’s expertise in Agile, DevOps, Cloud, and experience in implementing AI/ML, IoT, and Blockchain will help you ensure a smooth journey from legacy to latest technologies.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

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Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $396 billion in 2021, Additionally, by 2026, Gartner forecasts that the cloud market will take over 45% of overall IT spending on system infrastructure, and application software, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Organizations, to stay relevant in the current dynamic markets, need to continuously innovate and deliver a differentiated value to their customers. With the adoption of the cloud, businesses can focus on innovation by harnessing the benefits of the digital environment, scalability, faster time to market and cost efficiency.

While there are various stated benefits of migrating applications to the cloud, there are inherent challenges as well if due diligence is not done.

Challenges in cloud adoption:

Data security: Security is of paramount importance considering the ever-increasing threat vectors. Additional security measures are needed and due planning is required before migrating to the cloud. The user credentials, cloud services provider’s security controls, and patch management play an important role in ensuring cloud security.

Following are key enablers to achieve security in your cloud journey.

• Designing base security controls to develop secure landing zones on the cloud service provider platform.
• Creation of reusable templates with integrated security controls for a platform as a service
• Integrate operational processes & procedures with enterprise security tools combining platforms and services.
• Create role-based access control and define what access to be provided to each role
• Design policies on monitoring, configuring and change management for platform security controls.

While organizations are adapting their cloud implementations and there are true benefits in terms of making it lighter, faster and more accessible from customer point of view, security risk are also huge. In order to balance the security and speed, companies should continuously work to develop their capabilities on:

• Know your security posture and review it regularly
• Automate native security
• Be proactive with compliance and bring automation in it
• Employ comprehensive security monitoring and response

Service Quality: Organizations put Disaster Recovery systems in place where on-premise systems are involved.  We have seen in the recent past, where major cloud service providers have experienced outages and applications such as Facebook have suffered globally. Hence, we firmly believe it is the cloud provider’s responsibility to move the application to the cloud and assure on availability. Service quality of cloud services can be analyzed on the parameters of autoscaling, performance, latency, availability and responsiveness.

SLAs are to be defined and agreed with cloud service providers on key aspects such as:

• Data privacy
• Data ownership and control
• Service availability
• Quality of service parameters and their monitoring
• Change management process to modify SLAs

Performance: While cloud services are available everywhere to everyone, the experience is not the same for all users, it can differ due to internet speed, network fluctuations and the application architecture design. Performance tuning and configuration play a vital role in achieving optimal application performance generating a great user experience.

Performance-related issues include the geographical proximity of data to the end-user, network speed within the cloud to the external interfaces, speed between computation later and various data stores as well as to the end-users.

Governance: Cloud-based systems provide scalability, agility and faster time to market, on the other side they provide limited control on how infrastructure is provided and operated. Strict governance measures are to be used with agreed upon policies and procedures with cloud service providers, in order to safeguard organizational interests.

Few points to consider for cloud governance:

• Organizations to focus on governing how their employees are using cloud services intending to reducing cloud spending, improving auditability and optimizing security risks
• Perform risk analysis on what can be controlled in agreement with the cloud services provider
• Implement risk controls for cloud service provider vendor management program by continuously monitoring an action plan for identified quality levels.

Cloud adoption is beneficial if augmented with cloud assurance services: With carefully designed cloud adoption and migration assurance covering performance, user experience, and security aspects, cloud migration can be a smooth operation paving the way to achieve digital transformation, innovation as well as agility of operation for the organizations.

IGT’s migration assurance platform provides comprehensive testing services across the cloud migration lifecycle.

Connect with our cloud migration assurance experts to understand more about  achieving  cloud transformation without worrying about the challenges of security, performance and user experience.

Source: Gartner

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

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Consumers’ expectations are at an all-time high, and the upsurge in demand is currently driving the buying frenzy. Today’s tech-savvy consumers would prefer ordering over e-commerce stores to doing retail shopping. After a relatively lower sales period in 2020 due to the pandemic and stress, consumers and funds are now back to the pre-Covid era.

Going Digital in our Daily Lives

From small businesses to large, every business needs to undergo digital transformation to gain a competitive edge and to sustain itself in the long run. Digitalization aids in integrating technology in all aspects of business that helps improve productivity and deliver business value to customers.

According to Statista, the global spending on digital transformation is estimated to be 2.4 trillion USD. Simply put, every time you replace a physical process with a digital strategy, you engage in a digital transformation. When you decide not to cross a cheque for your mortgage payment and instead do an Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), you become part of digital transformation or Digital Commerce with one simple click!

Factors Driving Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is now an essential ingredient to stay in business. B2B and B2C companies now compete against each other in the online world. The whole competition is now taken over using MarTech firms that deliver outcome-based results while keeping consumer behavior and data insights in mind.

With most social media channels enabling e-commerce marketing strategies today, you can not only post online ads for your business but can also directly interact with customers and prospective clients.

Here’s why you need to embrace digital transformation to evolve into an “e-business” or e-commerce store if you haven’t:

Rising Customer Expectations

The rise in adoption rates of new and next-gen technologies like cloud computing, machine learning, AI-based algorithms, Robotics, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices have increased customer expectations.

The role of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is still underutilized by businesses today. Its diversified capabilities serve as an excellent opportunity to enhance customer experience by bringing the “store to the customer”.

A survey by iXtenso magazine found that virtual reality was important for 22% of its respondents during brand shopping as customers are now empowered with value-added unique shopping experiences. For example: expecting virtual experience while trying fashion apparel and accessories.

Strong Online presence for Brands

Brands need to have an online presence as it helps attract more customers and generates user engagements. Furthermore, the brand is capable of creating customer awareness and strengthening its credibility.

According to Salesforce.com, about 87% of shoppers seek product information and helpful reviews online — even if their final purchase plan is through a retail store. Consumers expect to find a brand’s updated information, including contact information, seamlessly while approaching them.

It furthermore found that e-commerce sites get 75% new search queries monthly and that 69% of customers expect new products irrespective of shopping online or at a retail store. This strongly emphasizes the need for brands to “keep it fresh” and ensure a seamless shopping experience for users while enhancing customer relations.

Rise of DTC (Direct to Consumer) selling

The direct-to-consumer selling strategy has exploded during the Covid times and changed the view of doing business. Today, enterprises can talk to their customers directly rather than through a third-party channel or platform.

In another survey by iXtenso magazine, more than 55% of shoppers want to buy directly from brand manufacturers.

OEMs that have progressed towards omnichannel marketing to deliver a seamless experience across devices make more sales. Companies who go with DTC control their customers’ experiences from start to finish, giving them the tremendous power to improve consumer satisfaction. Customer feedback, rating, and advocacy define your market dynamics on the ground since many first-time consumers watch for the feedback before adding to their shopping cart on your online store.

Digital Commerce Sales Accelerators

Technology advancement and inventions are fueling digital commerce the most. Certain innovations clubbed with customer behavior, and experience has ensured considerable jumps in sales figures for brands that went ahead with these accelerators.

For example:

• Today, big data has a significant role in enhancing personalization, storing massive sets of native data in a data lake for creating insights to predict consumer apprehensions. Large ecommerce brands like Amazon have used big data to provide consumers with highly personalized shopping experiences. Selling Alexa and other IoT/AI devices at a lower price opened up a stream of personified data collection for Amazon.
• Headless and API-driven ecommerce solutions are allowing continued innovation at a much faster pace one could imagine. You order at dinner and get the item delivered before lunch the next day; how quick and seamless the integration has become.

Tools and Platforms for Digital Transformation in Ecommerce

There has been an upsurge in companies offering tools and platforms to support and drive digital commerce. Few of these are categorized as FinTech startups with a SaaS whose product offerings are imbibed with seamless integration of various payment methods for a consumer.

Smartphones are a great tool to help users buy anything now. From AR-supported software that emerged as game-changers to enable seamless buying of furniture and clothing online or to order your favorite Cappuccino from Starbucks, digital transformation has made lives easier.

Recent data gathered by Statista predicts that in 2021, nearly 73% of ecommerce transactions will take place on mobile devices. Consumers mostly have a choice that if you don’t offer a fluid experience, they’ll simply shop elsewhere.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is a continuous process where you won’t be saying, “Alright, we can’t go beyond this.” It is an ongoing journey, and you will need to build many partners both on the supplier and consumer sides.

Digital commerce is where brands have bet enormous and reaped huge benefits from an online presence in terms of consumer sentiments, market share, and driving profitability while keeping the operational costs to the minimum. Ecommerce has been a clear winner way before the pandemic began. Economists predict retail ecommerce sales to reach 476.5 billion dollars by 2024, up from 279.7 billion dollars in 2017 for the US market alone.

There is still a plethora of opportunities available in the digital scope. Businesses’ capabilities are accelerated, and it is anticipated that they shall reap significant rewards by attracting investors, thereby changing the face of digital commerce in the coming years. 

Sources:
Ixtenso, RetailDive, Statista

Author :

Gaurav is the Practice head for Enterprise Solutions at IGT and also the SME of Retail, CPG and Ecommerce verticals.

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Being a gadget geek myself, I’ve made multiple purchases that are lying around the house without being used. This New Year, I made a resolution not to buy one, and a few days later, I was already itching to make the next tech purchase. So my wife suggested that I list down the reason for my next purchase and how it will benefit me, which inspired me to write this blog- making the right decision when it comes to Data Modernization and Cloud Services for the long term benefit of an organization.

Why do companies choose to modernize? Just because a service like Cloud is available and provides 24X7 infrastructure, does it imply that all companies need to implement it? Let’s understand both these services to understand better whether your business needs it and to what extent. Data modernization and Cloud Computing have emerged as critical factors in the Digital Transformation Journey. Data Modernization refers to “state of the art” data management tools that enable organizations to manage and process a large amount of structured and unstructured data from heterogeneous sources. Conventional data management tools are not equipped to harness large volumes of social media and IoT (Internet of Things) datasets. With modern data management tools, organizations would be able to capture and harness such information to understand actionable intelligence. Whereas, Cloud Computing enables access to IT resources such as Storage and Computing Cycles etc. that are much needed for implementing data-driven applications at scale.

The key to successful data modernization implementation is dependent on your business objectives. Following are some common business objectives that are part of most of our conversations with customers & prospects:

1. Cost Reduction: Rationalizing Operational spend on the applications
2. Improve response time for the end-users of the application
3. Reduce time to market for changes & onboarding new data sources
4. Auto-scaling: Ability to scale up & down the IT infrastructure automatically based on market demand while ensuring service levels remain intact
5. Ensuring high availability
6. Future Extendible: Ability to have an evolving system which extends to future data types & sources without the need for high maintenance

Now that we have identified the usual suspects, the next step is to identify which methodology is the right fit for the data modernization undertaking.

Re-architecting the solution:

1. Performance in terms of utilization of resources like memory, compute, storage.
2. Enablement of the current solution to take advantage of the autoscaling factor
3. Relook at the solution from the lens of DevOps, micro-services & containerization to make use of current technology in the solution. This helps to make it future-ready
4. Define naming standards, best practices and standard operating procedures
5. Define & decide data latency needs, security needs (including GDPR & other privacy laws), data governance including data retention, archival & operational management.
6. Define & decide encryption levels, agility & reliability needs, VPC pairing
7. Define & decide process around metadata management, data quality, cost monitoring

IGT plays a critical role in the data modernization and digital transformation for its customers. Whether it is defining a business/technical strategy roadmap, a high-level approach, or actual implementation of services and value management through support services, IGT has the needed expertise and experience to ensure successful digital transformation through data modernization on the cloud!

Our Approach:

To summarize, data modernization is an absolute must for a successful digital transformation of the organization and Cloud is both the means as well as a consequence of data modernization. They both go hand in hand. Data modernization gives rise to increased cloud spending and vice versa. IGT has helped many organizations in their Digital Transformation Journey.

Learn more about our services or reach out to mktg@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net to understand how we can partner with you!

Authors:

Bhushan Gangurde is passionate about solving business problems  using AI/ML, Analytics, Data & Automation and Digital technologies in that order. With more than 17 years of experience in field, he loves exploring new technologies and reading books. He heads IGT’s Center of Excellence for AI/ML & Automation.

Kiran Dongre is Analytics Presales head at IGT Solutions. He has more than 20 years of Analytics experience and have serviced many customers in their Digital Transformation journey through data modernization. Kiran is passionate to travel around the globe as well as loves playing Badminton. He can be reached at kiran.dongre@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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The pandemic has given many companies the opportunity to grow and innovate during these times. Some organizations have been able to take this opportunity and reinvent themselves and have started offering varied and need of the hour value based resources, while some continue to struggle. All in all, the pandemic has made businesses more conscious about where they spend their money and look for new and innovative solutions to optimize their customer service and experience.

The need for data analytics:

The rise of Artificial Intelligence & Analytics in the past few years had many organizations applying its core data practices to scale their businesses.  The coronavirus pandemic has further expanded these opportunities and also accelerated them in some cases. Organizations are quickly adopting data analytics; what once took months or years for companies to build came to life in a matter of weeks because of COVID-19.  As per a study by Analytics Insight in May 2020, 55% of businesses have started utilizing data to improve efficiency and rely on it to predict changes and outcomes. Forty-seven percent look to their data as indicators of how they can better support their customers, and 45% count on data to predict business outcomes. It is not surprising that companies have started to recognize data analytics for its problem solving capabilities and identifying potential disruptions.

Below are a few ways data analytics can help companies in building resilience during COVID-19:

• Tracking and responding

Data analytics has the ability to analyze large sets of data from numerous sources. Data such as news updates, hotel and airline booking trends, population density, demographics to name a few. Such information can help companies keep a track of upcoming trends and work a solution around it. For e.g. the Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases dashboard is using data analytics to trace the coronavirus.

This dashboard is not only helping us visualize the affected areas, deaths and recovered cases, but is also helping health officials learn how it is affecting different regions and communities.

• Sales and revenue

The customer behaviour is an ever evolving one, even more now as demands shift to online completely. Collection of data, analysis of customer sentiments and behaviour and experiences on all platforms etc. are some of the ways data analytics can help in carving new revenue streams. For e.g. a retail brand, which was brought to a standstill because of the lockdown managed to generate a revenue of Rs 34+ Lakhs by only spending Rs 27,000. The brand switched from offline to online and used a predictive modeling technique to arrive at segments of customers most likely to purchase and ran targeted and personalized campaigns to this set of customers.

• Working with emerging demands

Companies that run call centers to perform sales and customer service functions are facing huge pressure. By using analytics and artificial intelligence to identify customers most likely to be affected by the pandemic, companies can prepare a proactive communication plan to inform these customers about changes in policy and services. Furthermore, they can also use data analytics to segment queries based on urgencies.

• Keep an eye on competitors

Data analytics can give insights on steps taken by competitors to mitigate similar risks faced by your organization. Not just this, it has the ability to present insights into financial status, company profiles and updates, SWOT analysis and mergers of any kinds. A thorough competitive study of market players can help in evaluating the market, highlighting opportunities and decision making.

Keeping the ball rolling

Analytics and AI have gained more momentum rather quickly in these last few months, the behavioral and economic shift in the way businesses function has increased the demand for AI and analytics. Organizations had no choice but to fully align themselves with analytics driven solutions to prepare effectively for the business challenges that emerged overnight. However, investing in analytics and AI is an ongoing activity, as companies start to rebuild, leaders will have to rethink their business strategies and models consistently to stay in the competition game.

Below are a list of actions that the leaders must keep in mind to make the progress of data analytics stick:

• Communicate the importance of analytics and digital transformation to employees
• Treating AI and analytics resources as top priority
• Offer virtual learning and up skilling opportunities to employees to help structure agile teams
• Conduct regular audits for necessary fixes and implementing new modeling techniques
• Establish protocols to ensure consistency and efficiency in evaluating and developing new models and tools

Data analytics and artificial intelligence have largely helped the healthcare industry with COVID-19. Researchers and experts have leveraged these tools to do everything from tracking capacities in hospitals to identifying patients at high-risk. Many believe these technologies are vital for preparing for similar situations in the future too. Data analytics will turn out to be the star performer that will help in meeting customer’s needs, help make decisions, rethink operational models and help drive businesses to the new normal. While it will take effort and skill to adapt businesses to the evolving consumer needs, organizations who pay heed to the changes COVID-19 has brought to companies and work towards building a more resilient business which will be different from the past and have the potential to survive in the post COVID world.

IGT’s Analytics Services provides industries with specific advanced analytics solutions and personalization with the help of its cutting-edge technologies. We help customers make well-informed on-time business decisions throughout their digital transformation journey. Read more about our analytics solutions.

Author :

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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