As we close the page on 2023 and set our sights on next year , I think the technology industry has finally realised that modernisation is now the name of the game . Over the past 60 years , the technology industry has been very successful at rolling out new infrastructure and systems , however , we haven ’ t been as effective at cleaning up after ourselves . The ‘ layer cake ’ of IT has thus grown and grown over the years , leaving us with a mess of technical debt in the form of complex and expensive architecture which is difficult to change . Evidently , to clean up the technical debt lying in our wake , there needs to be a marked change in approach and in 2024 ; technology vendors must focus on delivering new and improved services to help customers become more agile .

Encouragingly , we ’ re still seeing a strong appetite from enterprise customers to become more cloud native at scale . However , unlike cloudonly approaches of years gone by , it ’ s clear that a measured , hybrid cloud strategy will deliver greater success – according to a recent survey by Kyndryl , 99 % of businesses are now taking this approach . A perfect example of where this is needed is the financial services industry , where banking environments run on decades-old mainframes . While these are tricky to maintain and even more tricky to swap out , they still deliver tremendous business value , offering enhanced security and deep veins of useful data which can be leveraged using AI-powered solutions . The value therefore lies in modernising these mainframes into a hybrid environment and next year it will be crucial for enterprises to have an IT infrastructure services partner with the experience and know-how to guide them through this tricky endeavour .

Another key consideration is the sustainability aspect of modernisation . In 2023 , we ’ ve rightly seen more pressure build on businesses to take responsibility for their carbon emissions . Now , technology vendors must not only be aware of the carbon footprint of building new applications , but also how they can help customers identify and rectify the environmental damage being caused by their legacy technology . Often , the most positive impact can be made in places which are the most difficult to optimise , such as bloated application code , which presents a significant test for teams clearing technical debt . As such , 2024 ’ s most sustainable modernisation projects will be those that put a great deal of effort and thinking into tackling these areas .

I think the technology industry has finally realised that modernisation is now the name of the game .

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Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 72 | Page 35