Modernizing applications involves updating outdated systems continuously using various methods, including data modernization and migration to the cloud, code reviews, UX redesign, and cloud migration. The new technology is introduced to enhance the IT system's capabilities and performance. It helps to replace legacy applications, re-architect and rebuild them, aligning existing software and modern requirements.
App modernization is a complex process requiring much knowledge and understanding. This can hinder a business's journey to digital transformation. This guide will give you insights into legacy application modernization and its benefits for a company. In this guide, I'll discuss the main challenges in modernizing legacy apps into microservices or other modern architectures. This will help you to achieve a successful digital transformation.
What Is A Legacy System?
Legacy systems refer to outdated technology or methods/languages, as well as software. These are still used by many organizations, despite the availability of newer technologies. Vendors do not support these systems, so they are difficult to upgrade or maintain. They are also incompatible with the latest hardware and software. This makes it difficult to integrate these systems with others.
What is Application Modernization?
Modernizing legacy applications involves updating outdated technology, platforms, and infrastructure to match modern architecture and platforms. This is part of an organization's effort to improve efficiency, promote innovation and grow. Application modernization journeys can differ depending on business goals, organization challenges, and the state of legacy systems. Modernization can take many forms and only sometimes means a complete system replacement. There are other options, such as updating, upgrading, or optimizing legacy systems, to a more modern architecture.
The "legacy system" is a computer or software that has been out of date for a long time. It can still provide important capabilities to an organization. Still, it cannot be upgraded or interact with any other systems. Modernizing legacy apps is a process that addresses known problems. These issues can include:
- Bugs in software that are not being resolved quickly
- It will take more work to complete the missing features.
- Code is fragile (changes can create problems).
- The technology is outdated (e.g. few people know the language of the source code used).
- The software company is no longer in business.
COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software) often does not allow access to source code, which prevents an organization from fixing software problems. Your organization has three options when it comes to modernizing apps for software that is open source.
- Reviving old applications
- Replace an existing application with a custom-built solution.
- The rehosting of a website or platforming.
This will involve updating the software to include new features and capabilities. Refactoring is another option.
Application Modernization Services
The legacy modernization service provides additional capabilities to the company to help address the issues mentioned above during the migration from the old to the new platform. Legacy application modernization includes options such as interoperability and recoding. The services also include legacy software modernization and clarifying the architecture of applications.
When Does An Application Turn Into A Legacy Application?
It's a process that takes time; applications become obsolete over time. Applications that do not update themselves or upgrade are at a higher risk of becoming obsolete earlier. When they encounter some challenges, 'modern' applications can become legacy systems. These include:
- A difficult time is maintaining or updating.
- Code bloat and hacked integrations can cause performance issues.
- Scaling is prone to instability and bottlenecks.
- Support for third-party application elements is no longer available.
- It is not compatible with the latest systems.
- Adapting the system quickly enough to meet changing customer demands takes time.
- Security or compliance threats.
Why Should You Upgrade Legacy Applications?
The inevitable is change. To save money, improve security, be prepared for future business opportunities, stay competitive and survive, businesses must modernize legacy applications. It has prioritized agility, but older systems are not equipped to deal with today's technological advances or changing competitive landscape. While many legacy applications are vital to business operations, the IT head must balance maintenance costs against migration and the modernization of the application.
In addition to cost, it is important to consider modern applications' strategic value in solving challenges associated with older applications. This includes the customer experience and the employee experience. Outdated, incompatible, or unavailable software can affect employee satisfaction and hinder business flexibility, reducing competitiveness. Digital transformation is driven by meeting customers' expectations, not the decision to upgrade legacy software.
Key Technologies for Application Modernization
Here are some key technologies you need to know to modernize your application:
- Cloud: Organizations often host or platform their applications in the cloud as part of an application modernization strategy. They can then choose from public, hybrid or multi-cloud solutions to benefit from cloud computing benefits such as cost reduction, scalability and agility.
- DevOps: Emphasizes a better collaboration between the operations and development teams and promotes continuous delivery, and automation, making it easier to update and deploy applications quickly and reliably.
- Microservices: The majority of legacy applications consist of monolithic, self-contained applications. Microservices, characterized by agility and flexibility, have become a popular approach to modernization. The focus is on services that are connected through APIs. This allows organizations to switch and choose between the best-of-breed solutions to adapt to changing markets and customer expectations.
- APIs: Allows data exchange and communication among applications. This makes it easy to integrate legacy systems with cloud-based applications. The APIs allow businesses to reap the cloud benefits without replacing existing systems.
- Containers: Containers are a flexible and lightweight way to package and deploy applications. They make it easier for users to move between different environments. The packaging allows for the operation and deployment of software in the cloud.
- Orchestration and Automation: Automating multiple tasks as part of a workflow or process is orchestrated. Automation and orchestration improve scaling, deployment security and networking efficiency.
Questions To Ask Before You Plan Application Modernization
Before a project to modernize a legacy app is undertaken, an organization must take a step back and evaluate the issues it is trying to solve. Before you embark on your modernization project, ask yourself these five important questions:
- What aspects of legacy applications are effective today?
- Which modernization strategy is best?
- What is the purpose of modernizing applications?
- What will be the impact of modernization on these goals?
- How do you modernize legacy systems?
- You can avoid legacy applications' modernization risks by asking these questions.
Seven Essential Steps For Legacy Application Modernization
This is a seven-step approach that organizations should use to evaluate legacy systems and then determine which application modernization strategy best suits their needs.
1. Evaluation Of Systems To Identify Problems
It is important to examine the application more closely if it fails to satisfy modern IT requirements or impedes business success. Assess what makes it difficult for employees or customers to use. Cost should be considered as well, not just the usability. It is more important to upgrade the application the more problems you find.
Understanding the parts of legacy systems that are working well is essential. You can better understand the pros and cons of an application by conducting a comprehensive analysis. This will also help you decide what to change and leave untouched. Take into consideration the following drivers to modernize your application:
- Businesses can align themselves with the alignment of their business.
- Costs
- Organizational agility
- Value for money
- Risk
- Complexity
2. Define Goals And Success Metrics
Modernizing applications primarily focuses on aligning business goals with Key Performance Indicators. A healthcare organization, for example, may choose to upgrade its EHR system to enhance patient satisfaction and care. Modernization can reduce the time required to share and access patient data between departments such as emergency rooms and pharmacies.
The organization's goal for modernization could be to reduce the time it takes to access and share patient information between different departments, such as the emergency room and the pharmacy. This would improve the patient experience, decrease wait times, and increase patient satisfaction. By addressing flaws, the organization will gain an advantage over other providers by providing faster and more efficient healthcare.
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Before planning a modernization project, identify the business objectives that this project should achieve. Assess constraints, such as budgets and personnel. Determine all the resources and people involved with the project, including the technical and business stakeholder. Project timeline, scope, and success metrics are also important factors. These factors should be carefully considered to determine the most effective modernization strategy:
- Improved Customer Experience and Employee Experience.
- Increased security measures reduce operational risk.
- Improved efficiency in the workplace.
- Customer interaction is enhanced
- New markets to penetrate
3. Prepare Everyone For An Important Cultural Shift
A significant culture shift is usually required when an organization begins a modernization process. It can be difficult for employees, particularly if they've been using certain technologies or tools for a long time. The employees may be unable to accept changes because of their familiarity with existing workflows and tools. Adopting these new ones could disrupt their sense of stability and security. They may need to be more open to learning new processes and technologies, leading to resistance.
Take steps to ensure a more seamless cultural transition. You can provide comprehensive training to help employees adapt to new workflows and tools. To make employees feel invested, openly communicate the advantages of modernization. Involve them in the decision-making process. Organizations can take these steps to help their employees embrace modernization and overcome resistance.
4. Take Into Consideration The "7 R"
The next step is to decide the best approach to modernize the legacy application. Seven different modernization approaches are included in the "7 R" approach:
- Retain: This strategy is low-risk because it integrates legacy components of applications into the new architecture, encapsulating or wrapping them up and allowing access to them via an API service. The microservices approach allows future expansion of the application.
- Rehost: Rehosting is transferring components from one infrastructure to another with little or no change. This method, also known as "lift and move," is used by many to migrate from on-premises to cloud applications quickly.
- Replatforming: Platforming is migrating existing software to a different platform or infrastructure. It could be moving an existing on-premises system to the cloud or switching cloud providers to achieve better performance, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.
- Refactor: Refactoring optimizes the code through refactoring to eliminate the technical debt that can lead to issues in legacy software. It involves changing code structures and removing outdated features, libraries, and frameworks.
- Rearchitect: The architecture of a legacy app involves significant code changes to migrate it to a better architecture.
- Build: Building an application means rewriting or redesigning it from the ground up while keeping its scope and specification.
- Replace: To replace a legacy application, you must first identify the issue and then find the best product solution. This is done through an extensive product development process. This approach aims to replace legacy applications that are no longer useful for many business reasons.
The organization can modernize legacy applications by first encapsulating and moving to more comprehensive strategies like rebuilding or replacing. Re-platforming and refactoring are the most common modernization methods. They offer an excellent balance between simplicity and ROI.
5. Select The Most Suitable Modernization Strategy
Organizations must assess each approach based on the following factors: cost, architecture, workload risk, security, and operation. Each company ranks these factors differently, as well as other aspects like market competition and changing consumer needs. While evaluating each option, it is important to consider features like agility and scalability.
6. Select Your Modernization Partner With Care
Most organizations need to place a high priority on application modernization. Their internal teams might need additional skills or resources to make appropriate decisions about modernization, cloud support, or microservices. Working with an expert in software services specializing in digital transformation is important. It has experience in modernizing technology, processes, and systems.
To maximize the time to market, team members must use Agile and DevOps. The initiative must be led by the chief architects, C-level executives, financial stakeholders, technology experts, implementation leaders, security and compliance specialists, project managers, and other key players.
No matter the number of roles in an organization, it may be necessary to acquire more skills. It is important to identify a modernization partner with the experience to maximize efficiency, reduce chaos and move the initiative toward the desired outcomes.
7. Monitor and Observe
Most organizations need to place a high priority on application modernization. Their internal teams might need additional skills or resources to make appropriate decisions about modernization, cloud support, or microservices. It is important to work with an expert in software services specializing in digital transformation who has experience modernizing technology, processes, and systems.
To maximize the time to market, team members must use Agile and DevOps. The initiative must be led by the chief architects, C-level executives, financial stakeholders, technology experts, implementation leaders, security and compliance specialists, project managers, and other key players.
App Modernization Tools
Application modernization tools are available in many forms. Here are some examples:
1. Containers and Kubernetes
They allow developers to build apps that can be adapted to various environments and are scalable.
2. Cloud Native Computing
The cloud is used to run operations in this model. Cloud-native technologies outsource software code to cloud providers but do not eliminate the need for servers. The code will then be executed as requests come in.
3. From Monolith to Application Modernization, Microservices
There are many reasons to switch from monolithic application architectures to microservices. Microservices make updates easier and cheaper from an architectural perspective because application components no longer need to be packaged together.
Application Modernization Challenges
Every application modernization plan faces many inherent challenges. Each of these factors directly impacts finding the right application modernization vendor for your enterprise.
1. Projects Can Lead To Vendor Lock-In In The Long Run
While modernizing applications, organizations may be forced to select a cloud or container vendor. This could lead to future cost increases.
2. Monoliths Can Be Difficult To Break Because They Are Designed That Way
It is difficult to modernize older versions of software like Oracle, SAP, or PeopleSoft because they were designed as monolithic systems. These legacy modernization applications, as well as the data, network settings, and security they use, often have a strong relationship with the infrastructure. It isn't easy to upgrade each component of the program due to this intimate relationship. Even small upgrades can begin a long, complex process.
3. Application Siloing
In larger companies, application silos are common. Different business units might run the same application on a completely different infrastructure. It makes it more difficult to test and for IT to optimize and consolidate the budget.
4. Tool Fatigue
Because the available tools are either application-specific (like SAP Landscape Management) or infrastructure-specific, it can be difficult for the IT operations team to manage a diverse portfolio of applications. Most IT operations teams also need help combining multiple product lines into one cohesive application delivery service because it is overwhelming to manage the avalanche tools and vendor contracts.
5. Legacy Conundrum
Companies that rely on legacy applications for modernization often need help with issues like incompatibility and unwelcome maintenance costs. They may also need more coders. It is this that hinders organizations from achieving a complete digital transformation. The integration issues that legacy applications bring are a major factor in igniting the fire. Modern technologies such as AI, IoT, and Cloud are difficult to integrate into legacy apps.
The Statistical Insights Indicate:
- Due to the reliance on legacy applications, 90% of companies cannot harness the full digital potential.
- The majority of companies (65%) believe legacy systems cannot meet the requirements of digital businesses.
- 88% of IT executives agree that digital businesses must modernize their IT systems.
- 82% of respondents believe not updating their IT systems negatively impacts the growth and sustainability of their company.
The Legacy Problem: Application Modernization
Cloud application modernization is updating existing legacy apps or building entirely new applications to align better with business objectives. Modernizing allows organizations to get rid of legacy code and benefit from new innovative technology. By rearchitecting existing legacy applications, organizations can achieve the flexibility and agility they need to meet business imperatives and take advantage of future opportunities.
Why Modernize Legacy Applications?
- Savings of 15-35% on infrastructure.
- Maintenance and operating costs can be reduced by 30-50%.
- Costs for hardware, software, and personnel are reduced by 74%.
- Application efficiency improved by 10%
- Increased revenue by 14%, or USD 1 billion on average.
In many industries, forward-thinking companies embrace new techniques and think around IT Modernization strategies to transform legacy systems into assets.
Business Benefits of Application Modernization
1. Competitive Advantage
Cloud modernization will give you an advantage over your competition. Modernizing your applications will double the digital adoption of the company. Modernizing your cloud infrastructure will allow you to keep up with the latest technologies, platforms, and applications.
2. Improved Compatibility
Modernizing legacy apps improves interoperability between them and new platforms, technologies, and codes. It also allows organizations to integrate applications seamlessly, allowing them to meet current and future demands better.
3. Cloud-Native
The cloud modernization process helps organizations to re-architect their legacy apps into cloud native applications. You can then enjoy the benefits of cloud computing, such as faster time to market, greater scalability and agility, or lower costs.
4. Better Efficiencies
Modernizing apps improves business efficiency and performance. Updates and bug fixes can improve the performance of apps. Modernization brings operational simplicity and reduces IT operation burden.
5. Robust Security
According to a recent survey, 87% of IT decision-makers admitted that outdated applications made businesses more susceptible to security threats. Outdated applications need to comply with current security standards or authentication methods. By modernizing applications, you can eliminate the security flaws in legacy systems.
6. Improved User Satisfaction
It can be frustrating for your customers or employees to use legacy software. The modernization of applications will increase customer satisfaction, as well as the reputation of your brand.
7. Staying Relevant
Modernizing the application cloud allows organizations to use new digital technologies such as AI, machine learning, big data and cloud. This helps you transform your IT environment based on market trends and create a flexible platform for future innovations.
8. Productivity Boost
IBM claims that updating legacy can boost developer productivity by up to 40%. Modernizing applications, and providing better access to developer services, can make engineering teams more efficient and improve time-to-market.
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Conclusion
There are several approaches to legacy application modernization. Each organization should choose one that best aligns with its strategic goals. Modernization methods may have their benefits but are often expensive, complicated, and difficult. Partnering with an outside service provider is the most efficient way to achieve software modernization.
Our Award-Winning team is uniquely positioned to assist you with planning and implementing the best modernization solutions for your business based on current and future needs. Our Application Modernization Services offer a low-risk, iterative approach to building, updating, and managing hybrid cloud applications.
Modernizing legacy applications is an ongoing process that requires organizations to adopt digital transformation holistically. This involves changing an organization's processes and culture to understand data across the enterprise better. It also requires balancing business needs with IT's capability to meet them.
Modernization is a continuous process that allows companies to learn and integrate new capabilities and tools. Cyber Infrastructure Inc. has a wealth of experience in modernizing legacy applications and supported many businesses on their application modernization journey. Contact us today at Cyber Infrastructure for a smooth and successful application modernisation.
