One of the biggest challenges facing IT leaders is digitising the very foundations of their businesses.
Key IT infrastructure holds essential financial data and plays a critical role in business operations. As a result, it is often seen as too complex and risky to be modified.
Yet choosing to stick with legacy IT brings its own risks. Older software poses security concerns, costs more to maintain and cannot fully support innovation and adaptability.
Businesses increasingly understand the benefit of modernisation. Foundry’s 2025 State of the CIO report found that infrastructure modernisation or migration was the third most popular reason for increasing technology budgets, cited by 26% of IT leaders.
But CIOs need to choose both how and what to modernise to drive business value.
Modernising IT architecture
Enterprise IT is undergoing another wave of deep-reaching change. Cloud computing is now well established as an alternative to on-premises technology. Managed well, the cloud brings benefits in cost, flexibility and resilience.
But all too often, organisations are failing to realise the cloud’s full potential. Moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud as they are can be costly and inflexible. These “lift and shift” migrations, often of entire servers or virtual machines, have left organisations facing rising cloud bills.
By moving to cloud-native technologies, enterprises will make better use of the cloud’s advantages, including scalability and usage-based pricing.
Cloud-native applications, running on microservices architectures such as Kubernetes, are flexible and allow more fine-grained control over how they consume resources. Options include both serverless applications and serverless containers, with the ability to run Kubernetes-based applications directly in the cloud.
AWS’s cloud services for serverless applications, for example, provide automatic optimisation of the resources an enterprise uses. This way, users never pay for over-provisioning, even as they scale up their workloads or need to increase performance. There is no need to manage physical servers, and security is also managed by the cloud provider.
AI, modernisation and costs
AI, too, is changing the way organisations develop and manage applications. CIOs can use AI to automate and streamline labour-intensive tasks, from “refactoring” or transforming application code from legacy to modern languages, to redesigning applications to work with microservices, to architecture as a code and pre-deployment planning.
AI is also playing an increasing role in planning cloud usage and managing costs by automating financial planning, or “finops.” Cloud providers such as AWS provide a host of costing information and usage data.
Analysts are increasingly using AI to improve finops, manage their cloud deployments and ensure value for money. Users of Amazon Bedrock, for example, can use its multi-agent capability, and Amazon Nova, to build finops agents to analyse and optimise costs and even supervise other agents.
With this technology, businesses can save costs on their existing cloud infrastructure as well as on modernised and cloud-native applications, in a secure and flexible way.
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