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No piece of technology lasts forever without needing an upgrade, whether that means SAP ERP systems like SAGE ERP or tablets and cell phones being updated regularly to remain competitive against complex business requirements and meet consumer and corporate consumer demand. Over time and programs, technology will become outdated or "legacy," eventually rendering itself unusable without its updates.
ERP systems such as those offered by SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft were created with specific constraints and expectations at their creation time. But as your business evolves, so too must its systems. Failure to upgrade can increase maintenance costs significantly while slowing performance significantly and creating an undesirable user experience for customers.
Legacy systems present unique challenges when modernizing them; we will discuss this topic and EdgeReady Cloud as a reliable means of modernizing legacy systems.
Legacy Modernization Explained
Legacy modernization refers to upgrading old systems with modern infrastructure to reduce IT costs while increasing collaboration, agility, and consistency for improved collaboration and consistency across your team. Legacy modernization works similarly to software upgrades in that both applications remain supported. At the same time, modern technologies create an ideal business platform.
Maintaining an up-to-date system is critical to the growth and expansion of any business, from automating internal processes to increasing productivity and customer service. EdgeReady Cloud offers legacy modernization for ERP systems such as SAP. By turning legacy applications into cloud applications while modernizing legacy code, EdgeReady can ensure internal processes run more smoothly while improving productivity and customer service.
What challenges would businesses encounter if they do not update their outdated systems? Your company could face many difficulties without updating its legacy systems, including these potential setbacks:
Legacy Modernization: Challenges And Opportunities
Inefficiency
Legacy systems may contribute to the inefficiency of internal processes and employee productivity by not meeting business practices and needs regarding automation requirements. Furthermore, their outdated nature often results in bugs or instability within their system, further exacerbating any ineffectiveness within it.
Security Threats
Legacy systems present serious security risks. Unfortunately, companies and vendors that created outdated systems often no longer support them after time has passed - this leaves these unsupported systems open to attacks from hackers due to no updates being sent through for maintenance updates and regular upgrades being no longer received on them.
Conflict With Emerging Technologies
Legacy systems that don't integrate well with modern technologies present another obstacle, often incompatibility with each other and making integration between software pieces challenging due to being standalone systems designed originally for another function. This can negatively affect agility, scalability, and flexibility within your company - EdgeReady Cloud can simplify modernizing ERPs by rewriting legacy code or modernizing legacy applications more seamlessly than other traditional approaches can do alone.
Lack of Data Insight
Data insights and analytics can be difficult to achieve using legacy systems built when big data isn't as ubiquitous or standardized for processing or capture. Modern technologies allow you to report on this information for business manual process improvement and utilize its best parts.
Legacy Modernization Benefits
After reading about the challenges a legacy system brings, you may be curious about the benefits of modernizing your company. What exactly would modernizing such an outdated legacy system involve?
- Increased Business Flexibility: By modernizing your system(s), modernizing will enhance customer service while producing automated and superior products/services for them.
- Improved Team Performance: Legacy systems hinder employee efficiency, forcing them to complete certain tasks manually. Meanwhile, modernized solutions automate tasks, freeing employees to focus on other aspects of business operations.
- Cutting-Edge Technologies: Legacy modernization ensures systems are upgraded with cutting-edge technologies for seamless integration into the present-day landscape.
- Security: Legacy modernization provides your company with a crucial way of updating critical business systems for safer transactions and is the cornerstone of security modernization efforts.
- Cost savings: Automating manual tasks that were once tedious will significantly reduce operating and maintenance expenses, negating the need to hire costly developers to support and operate them.
What is a Legacy System (LS)?
Legacy systems refer to software, technologies, and methods/languages that have become outdated but continue to be utilized within an organization despite this fact. Original manufacturers or vendors no longer support these legacy systems, making upgrading and maintenance expensive or difficult compared to newer hardware/software compatibility issues.
Once such issues arise, applications become legacy systems:
- Difficult updates or maintenance create additional IT expenses, both time and staff.
- Cod bloat can lead to performance problems, instabilities, and bottlenecks that threaten performance and reliability.
- New IT staff may find it challenging to cope with monolithic applications that include large portions of undocumented code or unaccounted-for elements.
- The modern application no longer supports third-party components.
- Application may no longer work on newer systems.
- No longer does the system adapt to changing customer requirements, anymore.
- Security or compliance risks.
Planned obsolescence refers to a product lifecycle; however, rapid technological development, shifting market conditions, and organizational restructuring often produce legacy systems that must remain active to remain functional and maintain business operations.
Legacy systems tend to feature outdated architecture with high maintenance costs and limited connectivity; these legacy systems often suffer from inefficiency, inflexibility, and redundant features (Gartner). Furthermore, complex logic for complex applications and processes is frequently hard-coded into legacy systems without proper documentation being made available to stakeholders.
What is Application Modernization (AM)?
"What is Legacy System Modernization?" is about upgrading legacy platforms, architecture, or features to modern standards.
Application Modernization journeys vary greatly based on the state and needs of legacy systems, organizational issues, and digital transformation goals. Modernization methods exist for migrating, optimizing, and updating legacy systems.
Why Modernize Legacy Applications?
Although agility has always been at the heart of IT systems design, those designed five or ten years ago could not foresee today's technological advances or competitive environment.
At some point in their IT manager's and executives' careers, they must assess whether legacy systems are essential in running the business and whether their ongoing costs should outweigh modernizing costs and migration options.
As part of any decision to modernize legacy applications, it is vital to evaluate their strategic value. According to a McKinsey study on COVID-19 and digital transformation acceleration, modern technology has changed immensely.
Modernizing legacy cloud-native applications is key to meeting the challenges presented by legacy applications, both financially and customer experience-wise.
Digital transformation can be an intricate undertaking. Outdated or mismatched software has the potential to negatively affect employee satisfaction; Adobe and G2 conducted a survey which showed 52% were unhappy at work due to software deficiencies or missing parts; 32% left their position due to technology impeding doing quality work.
What are the factors that motivate you to modernize legacy systems?
- Rapid Go-to-Market
- Improve Customer Experience
- New markets and Ecosystems
- Data Security and Privacy
- Other
Key Technologies For Application Modernization
Organizations that refer to "modernization" typically mean adopting various key technologies.
Cloud Modernizing applications often involves migrating them onto cloud hosting environments. Cloud computing offers several advantages over conventional hosting models, including greater scalability and agility.
Containers and Kubernetes
Containers may include:
- Cage Shipping Method
- Cloud Computing Cloud computing is deploying and operating software units within computer networks.
- Increase growth and motility.
Light and portable containers make deploying applications much simpler across environments. Kubernetes is an orchestration system used to manage containers and automate processes.
Microservices
Modernizing legacy applications typically involves replacing them with monolithic, single-tier solutions driven by agile approaches in response to changing employee and customer expectations. Most organizations opt for microservices-based approaches involving linked services with API interfaces, which allows organizations to select or replace best-of-breed solutions as required to address changing customer expectations or expand.
Orchestration and Automation
Orchestration refers to automating multiple tasks within an order or process; automation automates individual ones. However, orchestration improves deployment, scaling, and networking efficiency.
DevOps
DevOps is an approach for collaboration between development and operations teams with an emphasis on automation and continuous delivery that makes updating and deploying applications reliable and fast without significant extra work required from either group.
Here are a few strategies DevOps offers for application modernization:
- DevOps provides continuous integration and deployment capabilities so your organization can respond rapidly to market shifts or customer requirements without compromising the quality of development projects.
- DevOps practices promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which allows organizations to automate provisioning and managing infrastructure provisioning and management to reduce errors while speeding deployment times.
- DevOps' automated testing and quality control capabilities enable fast, reliable code testing while quickly finding errors before they cause production-wide disruptions.
- DevOps practices enable organizations to implement monitoring and analytics that track application performance and user behaviors over time and highlight areas for optimization or further enhancement. By compiling such data, organizations can better monitor applications more closely over time and pinpoint areas that require further improvements.
APIs
APIs allow applications to share data and interact, making integration possible between older apps and new cloud-based systems without replacing anything completely. You can enjoy all the advantages of cloud computing without replacing an older system completely.
APIs can be leveraged to develop various types of applications.
- Break down large monolithic applications into individual microservices you can develop independently of each other and maintain separately to scale individual parts rather than having to update everything simultaneously.
- Craft mobile and web apps that connect seamlessly to backend modern systems for improved user experiences by providing functionality and content through these channels.
- Partner organizations can access data and functionality within an application by accessing data through APIs monetized and formed partnerships, helping generate additional income sources for organizations.
API Management and Application Modernization
API management encompasses designing, publishing, and overseeing APIs so they are used effectively - an essential step toward modernizing applications.
Enhanced Security
API management uses authentication and access controls to restrict users who should gain access to sensitive data or functionality, helping protect APIs against cyber-attacks while decreasing data leak risks. API management also offers another form of protection. Here's another way APIs protect applications:
- API management can be accomplished using an API gateway, which serves as the front end to APIs and is equipped with security features like firewalls, traffic filtering, and rate-limiting capabilities.
- API management employs data encryption during transmission to safeguard sensitive information against being intercepted by attackers, even if in their possession.
- API management provides the means for quickly detecting and mitigating security breaches.
- API management enables organizations to meet industry and regulatory standards such as PCI DSS or HIPAA by offering effective methods for protecting sensitive information.
Data Sharing Between Systems And Applications Is Seamless
API management is an efficient means of connecting systems and applications, as it ensures all APIs are designed and implemented according to standard criteria - making sharing data and functionality much simpler between systems.
API management facilitates data transformations and protocol translations among systems, enabling integration despite different communication protocols or data formats.
API management, more commonly referred to by its acronym -- is also commonly known.
- Orchestrate services to achieve complex integrations. By doing so, organizations can build services composed of multiple APIs - which they can then share across systems.
- Utilize API gateway caching and load balancing features to increase performance and scale when connecting multiple systems.
- Monitoring and analytics tools designed specifically for API gateways can assist in quickly detecting integration problems and can quickly diagnose solutions to them.
New Revenue Streams
API management offers organizations many capabilities that can help them generate more income from monetization strategies, including:
- Measuring: Keep track of API usage by customers or partners and charge users according to metrics like API requests made or data transferred.
- Payment: Charge your partners or customers for API usage through subscription plans or pay-per-use charges.
- Pricing: To set prices for API services and features. These prices may change according to demand, complexity, and value.
- Partner Management: Build strong relationships with customers or partners through onboarding and access control measures.
- Self-Service: Allow partners or clients to sign up and manage API usage independently to reduce workload for organizations while improving user experience. This can reduce user frustration.
- Developer Portal: Create a developer's portal that contains documentation, tools, and resources necessary for API implementation and use by developers - this could increase adoption rates and revenue.
Analyzing and Monitoring
API (Application Programming Interfaces) management enables organizations with various monitoring and analytical capabilities for API usage monitoring to ensure your app satisfies expectations and business requirements.
These metrics will allow you to monitor the performance and usage of APIs within your app:
- Metrics for API Usage: Metrics used to assess API usage can provide insight into areas for improvement, including measuring API calls made and received, the amount of data transferred between servers, errors encountered during usage of an API service provider's APIs, or errors experienced with their service providers.
- Performance Metrics: Organizations can utilize performance metrics to monitor API performance and identify areas for enhancement, including response times, error rates, and latency.
- Alerts & Notifications: Organizations that use alerts and notifications effectively can identify issues quickly, reduce downtime quickly, and enhance user satisfaction by notifying them immediately and improving the user's experience.
- Analysis of Log Data: Log data analysis allows organizations to quickly diagnose issues and find root causes.
- Service level agreements (SLAs): SLAs allow businesses to set and monitor SLAs so that APIs perform at an acceptable level.
Offers Many Capabilities
API management offers many capabilities that can assist in overseeing APIs efficiently and governing them effectively.
- API lifecycle management enables organizations to effectively oversee APIs from development to retirement.
- Authentication, authorization, and role-based access controls help organizations manage who has access to APIs at what level.
- Organizations looking to protect APIs against cyber attacks may use encryption, tokenization, and threat detection methods.
- APIs with features like audit trails, data storage, and security help organizations comply with regulatory requirements such as GDPR or HIPAA.
- This framework was created to assist organizations with creating policies and procedures related to API management, such as policies, approval workflows, and change management.
- Organizations can monitor API performance and usage with monitoring and analytics tools such as alerts, dashboards, and performance metrics.
When Is It The Right Time To Modernize Legacy Applications?
Answering this question does not come easy; replacing outdated systems with contemporary ones requires careful planning and execution. Enterprises can maximize value by following a step-by-step IT Legacy Modernization strategy.
Here is a checklist that illustrates your business needs for modernizing legacy applications: If:
- Scalability problems arise when your legacy system cannot accommodate your company's evolving requirements or support future expansion.
- Your legacy system's architecture has been compromised significantly, and passwords hard-coded in.
- Your legacy system may create technical debt that limits business growth and expansion.
- Your legacy system could be compromised by outdated hardware and software without support from manufacturers or service providers.
When these indicators arise, it may be time for your business applications to be upgraded.
Migrating from an outdated legacy system to something different may be unnerving and stressful, especially if they have become comfortable and familiar. If your legacy technology exhibits these risk indicators, now might be an appropriate time to explore modernization strategies for legacy apps.
What should we expect from modernizing legacy systems? Before undertaking digital transformation techniques, you must gain clarity around this question and compare expected modernization results against legacy constraints.
What Can You Expect From Legacy Modernization Projects?
Legacy modernization enables businesses to adapt and revamp their current IT to meet both present and future business requirements.
Modernizing legacy systems or mainframes is critical for business transformation initiatives, helping you meet business goals more easily. Digital transformation initiatives of this sort may also assist.
Understanding all of the features and benefits offered by legacy application modernization is vital for realizing its business benefits, so here are some outcomes you should anticipate from such projects:
- Modernized processes help your business adapt to technological and market disruptions (by providing an improved user experience).
- Modernizing the mainframe creates a more compatible platform that facilitates greater integration of features.
- Implementing the Business Application Modernization Approach enhances security and reliability.
- By adding new capabilities to older systems, enabling new capabilities can help secure business logic that's intended to increase performance and shorten time to market.
- Modernization helps achieve operational efficiencies while incorporating navigation tools and online assistance plugins.
- Legacy modernization enables app development environments to become more agile and scalable, ultimately speeding up development processes.
- Modernization allows your business to take advantage of new technologies while making necessary modifications, creating an adaptable IT foundation.
- Modernizing legacy applications may also increase return on investment indirectly.
Once we've explored all of our options for legacy application modernization, let's dive deeper into this process. Here is a list of all approaches that may help create a modernization plan.
The 7 R's for Legacy Application Modernization Process
Modernizing legacy applications is a complex endeavor. Each modernization approach carries its own degree of difficulty and reward; therefore, selecting the most cost-effective method should ensure fast implementation of legacy applications and minimize operational delays. Below are the seven R's of modernization.
Rebuild
Rebuilding legacy systems is the most costly and longest process to implement, yet it produces the best results. Other R methods may help organizations modernize their systems. Still, only one provides for a complete transformation into cloud native environments - the rebuild method.
Rebuilding uses DevOps technologies such as APIs, Microservices, and Containers.
Rehosting
Rehosting is an approach that enables legacy systems to be deployed into new environments without altering code or changing functionality, enabling organizations to maintain legacy systems while still taking advantage of cloud infrastructure benefits. Rehosting, or "lift and shift," allows one to transition without redesigning existing systems while moving to the cloud.
Cloud-native software cannot reach its full potential with this modernization approach.
Refactor
Refactoring can improve performance in hybrid environments by altering backend components without altering functionality. This involves making changes on just one end while leaving other aspects unchanged.
Refactoring is often chosen because it's less disruptive than rewriting. Many organizations prefer this option because they have time to evaluate every element of an application's components and select an optimal platform.
Replace
To optimize business processes, this approach involves replacing an obsolete system with one more suitable to modern needs and ensuring existing data can be integrated seamlessly. However, disruptions should be minimized by ensuring existing data can be integrated seamlessly into the new one.
Retain
Organizations seldom leave their environment alone and let existing solutions continue to run as is. Yet, IT leaders often favor keeping legacy systems in place rather than modernizing them to ensure smooth app functionality and future planning.
Replatform
For this strategy to work effectively, all components of an app must be moved onto different platforms while maintaining their original features and functionalities. Re-platforming can facilitate this transition process.
An organization can benefit from enhanced performance with minimal infrastructure costs.
Retire
To retire a system is to abandon it completely and move its users over to an already functioning one; often, successfully eliminating legacy systems requires redesigning an entire operational process.
CTOs and IT managers must carefully weigh all technological decisions. What works for one business may not work equally well for theirs. Furthermore, modernizing legacy applications must consider your unique business's requirements before making decisions.
Conclusion
Modernizing legacy applications doesn't always require major alterations; sometimes minor tweaks to an existing system or no changes at all may do just as well, depending on its current state and how well it meets with long-term business goals. Sometimes, disruption may not even be noticeable at first.
