Imagine buying a high-performance sports car that runs like an old sedan. That’s the experience many businesses face when they move to the cloud. They expect speed, performance, and agility. While digital transformation promises faster and more efficient operations, better customer experience, and the ability to innovate ahead of the competition, the entire journey often lasts longer than expected.

So, what’s holding them back? Just as the oil in the old sedan can clog over time, legacy data creates stagnation and is underutilized by cloud-native apps. Organizations of all sizes must improve their data estate’s utilization and functionality — turning it into high-octane oil to accelerate digital transformation.

As enterprises expand, most new applications will initially run alongside legacy applications. However, the complexity of big data, analytics, data lakes, data marts, data fabric, and data science — along with the pressing need to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology that thrives on data — is further increasing complexity. 

In a recent survey, 82% of businesses indicated that their data is fragmented across the cloud and on-premises. This scenario slows enterprises down, diminishes ROI, and drains resources. Instead of being able to devote time to higher-value projects, many data scientists spend more than half their time collecting and organizing data instead of analyzing it. 

It doesn’t need to be this way if you have a strategy and work with data modernization experts.

For businesses to use data as a competitive advantage, they need to re-architect the data foundation from siloed, federated repositories serving few into an integrated, accessible data architecture. You can’t do that if you don’t start by modernizing your data.

By taking this approach, businesses can quickly discover, build, and manage data securely, and power apps and APIs with the high-octane oil (data) they need to maximize outcomes.

So, if utilizing more data is the challenge, what’s stopping businesses from getting this right? Data modernization is a challenging endeavor, and over 70% of organizations that have embarked on some form of data modernization encounter challenges in completing these programs as planned. Many such programs exceed the budget and often end up with a curtailed scope or are put on hold to be started later.

Some of the most common challenges are:

• A lack of clear strategy and understanding of the importance of data modernization in achieving business goals
• The time taken to modernize legacy data assets and the cost of change
• Adoption of new technologies 
• Interoperability between legacy and newer technology

Many organizations simply lack the resources, talent, and experience to get it right from the start. That’s when they typically look for outside help. But when companies align with the right partners from the start, the journey looks much different: shorter timelines, faster ROI, and the ability to innovate faster than the competition.

This isn’t just about making legacy and new applications work together; by taking the right approach to data modernization, businesses can make faster decisions by breaking down silos. This leads to better data quality that’s easily accessible while staying compliant with ever-changing laws and regulations.

It’s also important to understand that this isn’t a one-time initiative with a clearly defined beginning and end. As the technology landscape, generative AI (gen AI), and other trends emerge, the volume of data will continue to grow.

By our estimates, data grows by a factor of 10 every five years, making it critical for enterprises to keep pace with exponential data growth. That’s where Virtusa and Google Cloud come into the picture.

Organizations are turning to Virtusa and Google Cloud for data modernization to make apps more secure, reliable, scalable, and easier to manage. Using Virtusa’s data modernization expertise, businesses innovate faster, outpace competition, and improve customer experience. 

For over a decade, Virtusa and Google Cloud have consistently helped clients overcome the complexities of data modernization and set them on a path for success. Virtusa has a unique combination of data and industry expertise to help clients address specific data modernization challenges.

For each client engagement, Virtusa applies proven methodologies, accelerators, and best practices based on hundreds of data modernization projects. Combined with Google Cloud’s advanced data modernization capabilities, Virtusa’s methods help clients realize benefits such as cost efficiencies, reduced latency, and faster innovation at scale.

The approach starts with a detailed assessment, in which Virtusa evaluates the ability to execute, define specific outcomes, and compose a value case based on a multidimensional assessment. Factors include business value, information technology (IT) efficiency, IT health, cloud suitability, and customer objectives. 

With the assessment and discovery phases complete, Virtusa provides a clearly defined roadmap to get all parties on the same page. Starting this way paves the way for stronger collaboration, greater agility to provision resources as needed, and the ability to innovate faster by channeling valuable IT resources toward high-value projects rather than routine maintenance and support. 

Clients continue to turn to Virtusa and Google Cloud because they trust our record of liberating organizations from legacy data and freeing them from proprietary standards, punitive pricing terms, and frequent audits. These actions ultimately remove restraints, allowing clients to drive better employee engagement by adopting new processes and a culture of innovation.

With over 10,000 databases migrated and modernized on Google Cloud, Virtusa’s Engineering First approach drives transformative value with accelerators and solutions, including vDataAid and Data Pipeline-as-a-Service.

vDataAid helps organizations accelerate data modernization platform development by deploying a configurable and metadata-driven solution.

Data Pipeline-as-a-Service fast-tracks data modernization, including data governance as per banking standards, to achieve productivity gains of 30%.

In collaboration with Google Cloud, Virtusa firmly believes in the power of data modernization to not only streamline operations but also redefine the very essence of how businesses operate and thrive in the ever-evolving digital era.