How to Conduct a Unique Application Modernization Assessment
It’s critical that higher education institutions conduct a holistic assessment, one that looks not only at the technology but also at whether the university has the staffing and resources to maintain certain applications, Peters explains.SAMA is designed to approach the modernization process by breaking down silos between different elements of an institution, including developers, security teams, network engineers and others.
How does it work? SAMA essentially monitors a university’s entire application portfolio and then identifies which items are prime for modernization tasks — and it’s all done as an automated process so IT leaders can get a macro-level view into their software updates, fast and affordably.
Peters, the principal developer of SAMA, compares the process to improving a car’s design. It’s an undertaking that requires conversations with specialists in engines, electrical systems, braking systems and so on. And SAMA’s approach to application assessment involves gathering all the knowledge of relevant specialists only it’s through built-in security scanning, custom reporting and analysis tools. This speeds up the assessment process by obviating the need for separate initial conversations with every team.
“We want to look at the portfolio instead of just one little piece of the puzzle,” Peters says.
The process begins with CDW engineers installing and configuring a virtual machine to run the SAMA tool in an organization’s environment. SAMA then gathers data from the institution’s code repositories, covering more than 40 languages as well as applications on mainframes or in the cloud. All of this work is done on-premises for the organization, never remotely. SAMA then looks for tasks that have been completed around modernization by monitoring that changes were made in the application portfolio.
Why an Assessment Accelerates the App Modernization Process
Peters says that a typical manual assessment of a college’s codebase can take roughly 12 to 18 months to do manually. However, with SAMA, IT leaders can get an automated assessment completed in just two to three weeks, depending on the portfolio size.
SAMA scans applications’ metadata and source code only and does not scan databases or agents on institions’ networks. The assessment gathers data, determines whether applications can run in the cloud, and detects anomalies in code. It also evaluates the security level of each application.
