Whitepaper Summary

Modernising legacy applications onto Kubernetes brings far more risk and complexity than most leaders expect. The notion of simply “lifting and shifting” workloads into container orchestration is misleading and often harmful. Many organisations discover too late that they have underestimated the time, cost, and organisational change required for a successful transition.

Legacy systems frequently contain hidden traps that stall progress - tightly coupled code, undocumented dependencies, weak CI/CD foundations, limited container expertise, and fragile infrastructure. Migration is not just a technical project but a cultural, operational, and governance challenge that demands collaboration, discipline, and visibility.

By identifying these challenges early and addressing them systematically, IT and platform teams can close the gap between ambition and delivery. Sustainable success depends not on Kubernetes alone but on the groundwork of refactoring, process improvement, team enablement, and risk management that turns modernisation from a high-risk experiment into a repeatable capability.

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