What’s Old Is New Again!
In this internet-dominated world, where technology is evolving rapidly, legacy applications can be proven to be risky for the organization, slowing down their growth and stopping them for achieving a competitive edge. This centralized monolithic legacy application can be burdensome to maintain whilst consuming a lot of the IT budget.
Keeping legacy applications running efficiently can be a resource-intensive and time-consuming process, especially when the software becomes so obsolete that it is no more compatible with the latest versions of OS and system hardware.
Undoubtedly, they have a reason to modernize their legacy app and stay abreast with emerging technology trends. Listed below are a few reasons why enterprises must modernize their legacy applications.
- Poorer system performance
- High maintenance costs
- Older architecture
- Slow down in the product lifecycle
Application modernization enables businesses to transform their legacy applications to become more productive, mobile, efficient and agile. These needs to modernize their app in order to improve their market competitiveness, future-proof their technology investments and curb the revenue loss from these aging apps.
What is Application Modernization?
It is a method of aligning the stacks of the legacy application with the present business and functionality requirements. It involves re-architecting or refactoring the legacy application to better react to market changes, present business needs and data-driven decision making. Its main goal is to enhance or replace the business functionality of the core system.
The two of the major driving aspects for the organizations to board the application modernization journey is – productivity enhancement and cost reduction.
Application Modernization Roadmap
A successful application modernization path is designed to choose the right technology stack and the right approach without disturbing the existing business process.
- Evaluate Application Portfolio
Assess application usage, existing legacy environment, data types and interdependencies and determine how it aligns with the present business objectives.
- Evaluate and Select The Right Strategy
To ensure to achieve the required business outcome, assess several options and select the optimal combination of tools, techniques, solutions and efforts.
- Evaluate Expense, Effort & Time
Determine various options for application modernization driven by your business objectives and application assessment.
Application Modernization Approach & Options
- Re-host
Commonly known as “lift and shift” approach, it involves moving the underlying resources of your application to the cloud. In this model, the infrastructure is migrated to cloud IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) while keeping codebase of the application same. Though this might be the easiest approach, it leaves the application as it is.
- Re-factor
In this approach, codebase mostly remains the same while it is migrated to cloud IaaS, including cloud-based storage, compute and network resources. Developers can reuse languages, containers and frameworks, thus leveraging the strategic code of the company.
- Re-architect
As per the micro services model, the legacy monolithic application is re-architected, containerizing them and use modern DevOps practices. It involves dividing the application into a set of services that can be built, managed and deployed independently.
This offers several benefits like, reduces costs, enhanced customer experience, business agility and fast response time. Technology leveraged includes microservices, containerization, serverless, modern DevOps practices and cloud-provided (PaaS).
- Rebuild
In this approach, the legacy application is rewritten as a cloud-native application. It helps in reducing overall operational costs, release value faster and accelerate innovation. You’ll be surprised to know that with the advancement in technology, languages, frameworks, etc., the efforts required to rebuild the legacy application today are far less than what required in building the legacy application.
- Replace
If your legacy application still has some useful functionality, you can replace it with a more agile cloud-based solution. Using the SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution offers several benefits like:
- Cost savings
- Better security
- Allows you to use the latest version without the need for updates
Application Modernization Trends
The most popular application modernization trend is containers. It is a software-defined environment that contains tools, code, libraries required to operate. Containers make certain that the application runs securely and smoothly, regardless of the environment. These containers can be easily managed by cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes. It is widely used to manage containerized services and workloads.
Microservices along with containers help businesses in streamlining the process of application modernization by alleviating interdependencies and making the applications more agile and flexible.
Conclusion:
An updated application empowers your organization to build new services and processes that add value to the customers with a more user-friendly interface. Application modernization allows your business to take advantage of the latest technologies and Exemplar Technologies team is well-equipped to provide consulting and engineering to give your business a competitive edge.To start your application modernization journey, get in touch with us at +91 953-762-4454 and learn how we can speed up your business processes.