Application Modernization and Security in a Hybrid Environment

Amar Narain, Chief Information Technology and Vice President of Information Technology, Pizza Pizza [Tse: Pza]

Amar Narain, Chief Information Technology and Vice President of Information Technology, Pizza Pizza [Tse: Pza]

The retail landscape is very customer-centric, especially in Quick Service Restaurants (QSR). The competition is fierce, and having a good product is fundamental. Still, ensuring customer service and leveraging technology to create convenience and self-service are what sets you apart from everyone else. Therefore, the evolution of technology is not an option but a race to meet customer demand.

Application modernization is a huge overhaul that can take years, but a necessary step for an agile platform. Lifting and shifting an application to the cloud is not modernization but a band-aid and avoids the inevitable. Rewriting an application or using a native cloud application is the best path to modernization. Coming from an industry where your business is heavily based on consumers, your website, apps, and call centre applications must be fast and easy to use. Cloud adaption is necessary because as volume increases, so do resources, and an agile platform allows for quicker development of new features and adding new technology to an existing system.

Then you have the talent skill set, whether it is your internal IT team or you are outsourcing. There is an investment to continue to evolve your people to new technology, but that is just one aspect - the people part is the most important to maintain and to keep your employees engaged. Team comradery and an inclusive and collaborative culture is an integral part of any employee's environment. Fostering such a culture brings creativity and high performance to the team.

Don't forget about security; this keeps us up at night. Security is becoming increasingly complex and expensive to manage, especially for a medium size organization. Managing security is always a challenge as a mid-size organization with a hybrid environment. The best approach to mitigate complexity, having the expertise and managing the cost is a hybrid approach - a combination of managed service with an AI platform and your internal team. This approach gives us the expertise required to manage our system 24/7 and keep all systems up-to-date.

Considering the speed of technology, competition, people talent and security, it's imperative to have a long-term plan to survive in such an industry.

In the QSR industry, customers want to order online on the website or apps quickly and conveniently. As an organization that owns two data centres with homegrown applications for the website, apps, call centre, and point of sale (POS), five years ago, a road map was put in place with a cloud strategy. The first phase was the website and apps for the primary brand into the cloud - but how? Migrating would be a faster approach but with limitations for future application growth. The right solution was to rewrite the backend and frontend from scratch using the native cloud tools and features. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with microservice was the chosen cloud solution. It took us two-plus years, using a consulting agency to develop the responsive website and two native apps - iOS and Android.

Application Modernization Is Not An Option But A Race To Meet Customer Demand And Stay Ahead Of The Competition, With Security As The Critical Foundation For Success

The result from this modernization was astronomical - the new design of the apps and website was intuitive to our customers, it was very fast, whether it's 1,000 or 100,000 visitors, and transactions increased as did average tickets. Now changes to the website and apps are done much faster. No more manual maintenance - most tasks are automated. This allows our developers to focus more on other projects and less time on day-to-day repetitive tasks.

The journey for application modernization continues with our call centre apps which is the most complex as it deals with customer call back’s for various reasons.