Pressure from startups and competitors combined with growing expectations for quality digital experiences from users, customers, and employees create a perfect storm for today’s organizations. Never has the need for digital transformation been so strong, and companies can best address this requirement by revisiting their legacy applications and services and asking some basic questions: are our IT investments fit-for-purpose now? Will they continue to be into the future? Can we scale to meet increased demand? Can our IT frameworks and methodologies support rapid strategic change?

For many, digital transformation means looking to the cloud to answer questions around extensibility and security, but in many instances, it’s not just a case of picking up older technologies and dropping them onto a cloud host. With legacy technology (legacy can mean just two or three years old – such is the speed of technological change), it’s not just a matter of hosting in a cloud rather than on-premise. In very short timescales, operational changes and new strategies will be required and will continue to affect the applications that organizations rely on. That leads to the need to re-evaluate core applications that may no longer be fit-for-purpose.

Companies should look at their ongoing digital transformation strategies and ensure they can efficiently execute on cloud migrations. As applications transition, they are also either extended or replaced altogether. However, a big problem with this remains: a lack of skilled developers and “traditional” development timescales.

According to IDC, in 2021 the world was 1.4 million developers short – a 10% shortage. That figure is expected to double in the next few years. In a suppliers’ market, that means costs (in the form of wages and ancillary benefits) are set to rise. And with fewer developer skills available in-house, production times are likely to increase, not decrease.

The answer for organizations that need to modernize and yet address development issues is low-code. Powerful, cloud-native low-code frameworks mean that line-of-business experts (in tandem with IT professionals) become creators of technology, not mere consumers. By bringing highly specialized knowledge to the development process, the business gets highly applicable software written by the people who will use it.

The IDC paper quoted above talks about “model-driven, visual solutions” for businesses being the answer to aligning strategic priorities with the software needed to support and further those strategies. Until now, low-code applications could be ported to the cloud but were not cloud-native and were not optimized to their cloud environment.

However, the OutSystems Cloud on AWS is the solution businesses have been waiting for. It gives organizations the ability to massively accelerate times-to-production for apps and services that are 100% in line with business needs. But being cloud-native, the applications hit even the most stringent targets for reliability, scalability, and resilience.

Available right from the AWS Marketplace, OutSystems empowers today’s organizations to move from a reactive, legacy-rich environment to a proactive, future-focused, digital-native approach. It hits the three overbearing issues facing IT today: enterprise-grade applications and services, freedom from technical debt, and a fully cloud-native development and hosting framework.

Low-code brings different stakeholders to the development environment, providing the tools and methods needed to easily and quickly build enterprise-grade applications that satisfy broad business demand. The environment also helps existing development teams move past mundane, repetitive coding challenges, refocusing goals on business outcomes.

With OutSystems on AWS, companies can update their legacy IT, modernize their development processes, and refocus their digital transformation activities on what matters to them:

• Meeting new disruptive challengers,
• Providing next-generation CX and employer experiences,
• Creating a fast time-to-market for innovative new products and services.

To learn more about OutSystems platform’s capabilities in low-code and in a cloud-native environment, reach out to a representative from the company today. Or, you can get started right away by clicking through here.