The process of updating legacy applications and infrastructure to take advantage of cloud-native technologies and practices. Like renovating an old building with modern amenities.
A bank modernizes its 30-year-old mainframe application by breaking it into microservices and deploying them on Kubernetes.
Cloud modernization is a strategy and set of practices rather than a single cloud service. All major providers offer building blocks (containers, managed databases, CI/CD, observability, migration tools) that you combine to modernize applications and infrastructure.