CIO Corner: Modernizing the Enterprise Monolith by Mark Hewitt

Monolithic enterprise applications have been the backbone of many businesses for decades. These applications, often written in older programming languages and architectures, have served their purpose well, but can face challenges in terms of scalability, maintainability, and flexibility to the current, changing technical landscape. As a CIO, modernizing your enterprise monolith application can be crucial for staying competitive and effectively tackling the challenges ahead.

One of the biggest difficulties with modernizing a monolithic application is often its size and complexity. These applications are typically large and have a lot of interdependencies, some of which may be unclear to the team supporting them. Older technology stacks can contribute to the problems, whether by lack of documentation, lack of available expertise still able to best use them, or by the inflexibilities they present to the very act of modernizing them.

Modernizing a monolith may involve breaking it down into smaller, more manageable micro-services. This approach allows you to update and scale individual components of the application without disrupting the entire system, and can at a minimum allow for a new portion and an old portion to be running entirely different versions of a stack, or different stacks. Micro-services come with architecture benefits that may be of interest, for example by using modern technologies such as containers and Kubernetes, you can easily deploy and scale these micro services. Against this, one has to weigh the additional complexity and governance that multiple codebases and services may bring; sound planning and understanding is vital in order to keep a micro-service-based architecture well organized.

Another important aspect of modernizing a large application is to make it more agile and adaptable to changing business needs. Iterative development and incremental improvement to functionality have become more commonplace ways to handle feature development, and modernizing can be the right time to implement DevOps practices, such as continuous integration and delivery, to help support faster and more frequent updates and releases.

In every big technical endeavor, security needs to be a high priority. Whether the existing enterprise solution had complicated security which needs to be replicated, or if there were known gaps, modernization efforts must check and double check to make sure the result meets the security needs of the business and its users, and mitigates risks appropriately. Realities which existed when a monolith started life, for example only accessible within a network, may no longer be the case especially once hosting in the cloud, and assumptions should be challenged.

Modernizing your enterprise monolithic application is crucial for staying competitive in today's rapidly changing business landscape. No two situations are exactly alike, and the priorities of modernization efforts must take into account challenges of the past, current limitations and the aspirations of where the business is heading.