From addressing increasing cloud complexity to integrating AI and migrating applications via containers or VMs, one underlying priority is strategic alignment
In today’s evolving business landscape, organizations around the world face a critical decision: whether to modernize enterprise applications by migrating from virtual machines to containers.
While many have focused solely on infrastructure investment as a solution, the real challenge lies in strategic alignment.
Container-based architectures offer clear advantages for new applications and suitable existing workloads, yet many businesses struggle with this transition. The core issue stems from IT leaders viewing their environments as fragmented systems, treating on-premises data centers, cloud providers, and edge computing as isolated entities rather than an interconnected ecosystem.
Success in hybrid multi-cloud environments requires an infrastructure flexible enough to support both virtual machines (VMs) and containers while enabling gradual containerization where beneficial. The goal is not just deploying tools — it is creating an adaptable architecture that reduces complexity and meets the demands of modern applications.
Taming the multiple challenges
Adding to the complexity are emerging technologies such as generative AI (GenAI), especially in terms of integrating them into the main IT infrastructure.
At a macro level, many business leaders expect application migrations to be relatively straightforward, with minor inconveniences. However, the web of complexities goes deeper:
- Many legacy systems, custom-built enterprise applications, and third-party software have not been fundamentally designed for a future with cloud computing in mind. These systems often come with tightly coupled dependencies and specific infrastructure requirements to meet regulatory and data requirements. This complicates migrating applications. This complexity manifests differently across application types. For new applications, organizations have the opportunity to design with cloud-native principles and containerization in mind from the start. However, existing enterprise applications — especially those with complex dependencies or regulatory requirements — may be better served by remaining in their current VM environments rather than forcing a container migration that brings more risk than reward.
- As embedding AI capabilities is now a given, a flexible, scalable foundation has become an expectation. AI workloads demand infrastructure that can efficiently handle diverse computational needs, from model training to inference deployment. Organizations still in the process of getting their cloud strategy right will encounter challenges and complexities in integration.
- Cost optimization is also another concern. Cloud providers, especially hyperscalers, have intricate pricing models, and migration projects will invariably induce hidden costs. Charges for data egress, storage, network bandwidth, and other services can quickly add up, making it difficult to accurately estimate and manage cloud expenditures. As a result, organizations tend to either overprovision or underutilize cloud resources. Without proper cloud monitoring and cost management tools, businesses may allocate more resources than necessary or fail to fully leverage their cloud infrastructure, leading to unnecessary spending and waste.
Organizations are thus hesitant to execute complex application migrations. Inertia coupled with a lack of incentive to follow through on enterprise application migrations is a potent mix. This leads to more technical complexities, cost pressures, and cultural rigidity.
Tapping a modular IT framework
By approaching application migration with a modular IT framework, organizations can align their IT systems with broader business goals while maintaining flexibility for different workload types.
The intent is strategic: break down complexity where beneficial, while avoiding unnecessary migration risk.
✓ For new applications and those well-suited to modernization, this means leveraging microservices and containerization through enterprise-grade Kubernetes solutions.
✓ For stable legacy applications performing well in VMs, this means maintaining that infrastructure while ensuring it can integrate smoothly with newer container-based systems.
Microservice architectures transform monolithic applications into more flexible, scalable systems. Microservices break down applications into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. This decoupling allows IT teams to focus on individual components without impacting an entire application, ensuring fewer disruptions while still meeting changing business demands. By designing applications as a collection of loosely coupled services, organizations can ensure that their IT infrastructure remains flexible, adaptable, and capable of handling future migration needs without significant re-platforming efforts.
Likewise, before purpose-built solutions became accessible, businesses relied on coupling-together scattered open source third-party tools to create and manage earlier versions of their containerized applications. This made containerized applications inherently difficult to coordinate when it came to updates and migrations. Today, we have enterprise-grade purpose-built solutions to consolidate all open-source tools used to build containerized applications. This has simplified operations, application mobility, and still integrate security and compliance.
Some success stories have involved banks migrating over 100 enterprise applications into microservices to ensure their banking services meet the changing IT landscape without disrupting internal work processes and operations. As you can see, a more distributed, modular approach to IT strategy will build more resilient applications that are easier to manage, deploy, and scale across hybrid cloud environments.
A future-ready infrastructure is distributed
In a future where hybrid multi-cloud is commonplace, success requires infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple paradigms: both VMs and containers. The true challenge and opportunity lies in adopting a future-ready strategy that incorporates application migration, infrastructure optimization, and application modernization into a cohesive IT approach via a distributed IT model.
This will address not only the immediate technical challenges but, more critically, position IT as a strategic enabler of long-term business success. By leveraging tools intentionally designed to bridge these complexities, organizations can unlock the full potential of their cloud environments in an increasingly fast-paced world.
