Why smart cloud modernisation is essential for your business

From monoliths to micro-services

For at least the past decade, we have been hearing about digital transformation and modernisation, and yet, many companies are still struggling to achieve their goals. There are a variety of reasons for this, but perhaps the most common is the tendency to treat modernisation as a “lift-and-shift” exercise instead of true transformation. This leads to suboptimal performance and higher costs. In other words, cloud in name only.

When a business is trying to get results fast, lift-and-shift seems like the best solution, promising all of the benefits of cloud quickly. While it may sound like modernisation, in reality, it’s just a change in where the app runs — not how it runs. This means that it’s fast, but not sustainable.

Ultimately, you get the cost of the cloud without the agility, performance, or savings it can offer. In some cases, apps may run slower, become less reliable, or cost more in cloud environments. Teams often treat lift-and-shift as “job done”, so true modernisation is postponed indefinitely. The result is that the business remains tied to outdated software and struggles to innovate quickly.

What’s the alternative?

If the goal is to unlock the full business value of the cloud — innovation, resilience, scale, and speed — companies must go beyond rehosting and commit to true architectural modernisation. Modernisation is more than just migrating workloads — it’s about rethinking and redesigning applications to leverage cloud-native capabilities.

 The 7 R’s of application modernisation were introduced to help companies decide how to handle each application in their portfolio when moving to or modernising in the cloud based on factors like complexity, value, and future business needs. Here’s a quick breakdown of the impact of each:

• Refactor
  • Higher initial investment but offers maximum long-term cost optimisation, scalability, and agility.
• Re-platform
  • Improves cost-to-performance ratio and reduces operational overhead, enabling early optimisation.
• Repurchase
  • Simplifies financial operations with predictable costs but needs governance to avoid SaaS sprawl.
• Rehost
  • Quick migration but often cost-inefficient.
• Relocate
  • A transitional strategy – it keeps the CapEx model but starts FinOps visibility and cost benchmarking.
• Retain
  • No cost savings initially, but avoids sunk costs where modernisation is not justified.
• Retire
  • Immediate and clean cost savings; critical for cloud cost hygiene.

 Sadly, rehosting remains the most prevalent because most companies don’t know where to start in order to achieve true modernisation. Even those organisations that have a modernisation strategy may have to contend with a lack of skills, limiting their long-term capabilities. Most in-house teams are trained in legacy tech and processes, or they may lack clarity on how to integrate security into modern cloud-native architectures. Companies also have to contend with cloud sprawl, and without proper FinOps or DevSecOps practices, costs balloon and risks grow.

Smart cloud modernisation

Smart cloud modernisation isn’t a one-time project—it’s a continuous journey. Successful companies treat it as a long-term transformation that evolves with their business needs and technology landscape. Despite the fact that it has a high initial investment, it offers a much higher strategic return.

By taking an end-to-end modernisation approach, the business can evolve from monoliths to micro-services, gaining lower TCO, greater agility, faster time to market, and future-ready infrastructure at every stage. This starts with a strategic plan that aligns technical execution with business goals, and ends with FinOps-optimised operations.

 FinOps provides the foundation for smart cloud modernisation, helping to establish the basics such as cost visibility and initial governance, building consistency and empowering teams, as well as optimising for value with full automation, predictive optimisation, and alignment to business outcomes. Without applying the Well-Architected Framework (WAF) and FinOps principles, application modernisation often results in specific issues like over-engineered or underperforming architectures; missed cost optimisation opportunities, leading to budget overruns; a lack of actionable ROI insights, making it hard to justify investments; and results that fail to align with business and technical objectives.

By leveraging WAF and FinOps frameworks together, you can ensure you’re doing modernisation right with a clear architectural strategy, performance metrics, and best practices, while also ensuring you’re doing the right modernisation aligned to cost efficiency, value delivery, and financial accountability. Together, they drive sustainable modernisation outcomes that are measurable and aligned with business timelines.

Smart Cloud Modernisation isn’t just a tech upgrade. It’s a FinOps-aligned transformation that helps organisations move fast, spend wisely, and innovate responsibly. It ensures every pound spent in the cloud delivers measurable business value.

Get ready to transform your business with the cloud

Smart cloud modernisation isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic imperative for agility, efficiency, and sustainable growth. It demands a blend of intelligent planning, modern architecture, robust financial discipline, integrated security, and continuous optimisation.

Don’t just migrate, truly modernise.

Download our complimentary Smart Cloud Modernisation Checklist today and gain a clear roadmap to unlock lasting value and innovation.