Enterprises have adopted new technologies to increase efficiency and gain a competitive edge over their competitors. Enterprises have an urgent need to modernize applications. Modernizing applications using new technologies and practices can bring multiple benefits to an organization. However, it is important to understand the use cases in order to create solutions and take full advantage of modern technologies.
The Complete Guide To Modernizing Applications
Software that is efficient and effective is essential to the running of business today. Legacy applications can be outdated systems that are a hindrance to business operations due to their outdated technology. They can lead to inefficiencies, slow progress and underperformance. Modernizing applications involves updating outdated systems continuously through various methods, including code review and data modernization. It introduces technologies that improve IT systems' capabilities and performance.
Successful application modernization allows organizations to replace, re-architect and rebuild legacy apps that do not meet their business goals, as well as align existing software to modern technical requirements. App modernization can be a barrier to a company's digital transformation if it is not done with sufficient knowledge and understanding.
What Does A Legacy System Mean?
The term legacy systems or applications refer to outdated technology, software, methods/languages, or other types of software. These are still used by many organizations, despite the availability of newer technologies. As vendors no longer provide support for these systems, they are difficult to upgrade or maintain. They are also incompatible with the latest hardware and software, which makes it difficult to integrate with other systems.
What is Application Modernization?
Modernizing legacy applications involves updating outdated features, infrastructure and technology in order to align them with modern platforms and architectural styles. This is part of an organization's effort to improve efficiency, promote innovation and grow. The path toward application modernisation might vary depending on organizational challenges, business objectives, and the current state of legacy systems. Modernization can take many forms and does not always mean a complete replacement. There are other options, such as updating, upgrading, or optimizing legacy systems, to a more modern architecture.
What Is A Legacy Application, And When Does It Become One?
It's not an overnight process; it happens gradually. Applications that do not update themselves or upgrade are at a higher risk of becoming outdated sooner. When they encounter some common challenges, 'modern' applications can become legacy systems. These challenges include:
- Difficulty maintaining or updating.
- Performance issues caused by code bloat and hacked integrations.
- Instability in scaling.
- Third-party applications elements are no longer supported.
- The application does not interact with the newer system.
- The system is not flexible enough to meet changing customer needs.
- Security or compliance risks.
Why Should You Modernize Legacy Software?
Change is inevitable. Businesses must modernize legacy applications in order to save money, improve security, be prepared for new opportunities, stay competitive and survive. It has always placed a high priority on agility, but older systems may be unable to cope with the technological advances or changing competitive landscape of today. While many legacy systems are essential for business operations and must be maintained, IT leaders need to weigh their costs against migration costs and the ongoing cost of maintaining these systems.
In addition to cost, it is important to consider the strategic value of modern applications when addressing legacy application challenges. This includes customer and employee satisfaction. Software that is outdated, incompatible, or lacking can affect employee satisfaction and hinder business adaptability. This will ultimately reduce competitiveness. Digital transformation is driven by meeting customer expectations, not the decision to modernize legacy apps.
Key Technologies For Application Modernization
Here are some key technologies you should be familiar with to ensure your application modernization is up to date:
- Cloud: Organizations often rehost applications or re-platform them on the cloud as part of their application modernization strategy. They can then choose from public, hybrid, multi-cloud, or private cloud options in order to benefit from the benefits of cloud computing, including scalability and agility. Cloud technologies are a major supporter and catalyst for application modernization. Cloud is today's most popular destination for migration efforts. Public cloud platforms, hybrid clouds, and private clouds are all included. PaaS is the most popular choice for developers to develop modern applications. It has replaced IaaS or SaaS.
- DevOps: DevOps focuses on better collaboration between the operations and development teams and promotes continuous delivery and automation, making it easier to deploy and update apps reliably and rapidly without hassle.
- Microservices: The majority of legacy applications are monolithic, monolithic, self-contained applications. Microservices are a popular approach to modernization because they promote agility. The focus is on services that are connected via APIs. This allows organizations to select and switch between the best-of-breed solutions to meet changing market and customer expectations.
- APIs: APIs enable data sharing and communication among applications. They make it easy to integrate legacy applications into newer cloud-based systems. APIs allow businesses to reap the benefits of cloud computing without replacing existing systems.
- Containers: Containers are a lightweight, versatile way to package and deploy applications. They simplify moving between environments. This packaging method allows for the deployment and operation in the cloud of software units, ultimately leading to growth and flexibility benefits.
- Orchestration And Automation: Automation allows individual tasks to run independently, while orchestration automates a number of functions in a workflow or process. Automation and orchestration improve scaling, deployment and security.
Questions For Enterprise Before Planning Application Modernization
Before a project to modernize a legacy app is undertaken, an organization must first take a step back and evaluate the problem that it is trying to solve. Before you embark on your modernization journey, ask yourself these five questions:
- What aspects of legacy applications are currently in use?
- What is the best modernization strategy?
- What are the goals of application modernization?
- How will modernization achieve these goals?
- What are the stages of modernizing legacy systems, and what is involved?
- You can avoid legacy application modernization risks by asking these questions.
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The Seven Essential Steps Of Legacy Application Modernization Strategy
This is a seven-step strategy organization can use to evaluate legacy systems and determine which application modernization method best suits their needs.
Evaluate Systems And Define Problems
It is important to examine the legacy application if it does not meet the modern IT requirements of an organization or if it hinders business success. Assess what makes it difficult for employees or customers to use. Cost should be considered, as well as usability, when deciding whether or not to keep using legacy systems. The more problems you find, the more important it is to upgrade the application.
Understanding the parts of the legacy system which work 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 improve or leave untouched. Consider the following drivers for modernizing your application:
- Business alignment
- Costs
- Organizational agility
- Business Value
- Risk
- Complexity
Define The Goals And Success Metrics
Modernizing applications is mainly focused on aligning Key Performance Indicators with business goals. A healthcare organization, for example, may decide to upgrade its electronic health records (EHR) to improve the care of patients and their satisfaction. Modernization can be aimed at reducing the time required to share and access patient data between departments such as emergency rooms and pharmacies.
The organization can increase patient satisfaction by streamlining its EHR system. This will improve patient outcomes, reduce waiting times and enhance patient satisfaction. By addressing flaws, the organization can gain a competitive edge by offering faster and more efficient healthcare than other providers.
Before planning a project of modernization, identify the business goals that should be achieved by the project. Assess constraints, such as budgets, personnel and processes. Determine the resources and personnel required for the project, including the technical and business stakeholders. Project timeline, scope and success metrics are also important factors to consider. These factors should be carefully considered to determine the best modernization strategy.
Common Organizational Goals:
- Improved Customer Experience and Experience.
- Increased security measures to reduce operational risks.
- Improved organizational efficiency.
- Customer interaction is enhanced.
- New markets to penetrate.
Get Everyone Ready For A Significant Cultural Change
A significant cultural change is often required when an organization begins a modernization process. It can be difficult for employees to accept a change of this magnitude, especially if the tools and technologies they use have been in place for a long time. The employees may not be able to accept the change because they have become accustomed to the way things are done. Adopting new tools or workflows can disrupt their sense of stability and security. It is possible that they are apprehensive to learn new processes and technologies, which can lead to resistance.
Take steps to ensure a smoother transition. To help employees adapt to new tools and workflows, you can provide them with comprehensive training and support. It is also important to communicate openly about the benefits modernization brings and involve your employees in the decision-making process. This will help them feel more invested. These steps can help organizations overcome employee resistance to cultural changes and embrace modernization.
Consider The '7 Rs'
The next step is to decide the best approach to modernize the application. The "7 R" are seven different approaches to application modernization.
Retain: This strategy is low-risk because it integrates legacy components into the new architecture, encapsulating or wrapping them and allowing access to them via an API service. This allows future application expansion by using a microservices-based system.
Rehost: Rehosting is the process of transferring components from one infrastructure to another with minimal or zero changes. This method, also known as "lift-and-shift," is used to quickly migrate applications from on-premises to the cloud.
Replatforming: Replatforming is the process of migrating a software system from one platform to another. It could be moving an on-premises system to the cloud or switching cloud providers to improve performance or cost efficiency.
Refactor: Refactoring is a method of optimizing code through a restructured structure. This can be used to eliminate technical debt that may cause problems with legacy software. This process involves changing the structure of code and removing outdated or inefficient libraries, frameworks and code.
Rearchitect: Rearchitecting an application that is a legacy involves significant code changes in order to migrate it to a better architecture.
Rebuild: To rebuild an application, it is necessary to rewrite or redesign it completely while maintaining its scope and specifications.
Replace: To replace a legacy system; you must first identify the problem. Then you will need to find the right product solution using a thorough product development process. This approach is designed to retire an existing legacy application that has become unusable for various reasons.
The organization can modernize legacy applications by encapsulating them first and then moving to a comprehensive modernization strategy such as refactoring. Re-platforming and refactoring are the most common modernization methods. They offer a balance between ease of use and return on investment.
Choose The Best-Fitting Modernization Approach
Organizations must assess each option in terms of cost, architecture, workloads, risk, security and operations before selecting the best modernization strategy. These factors are ranked differently by each organization. Other considerations, such as changing market conditions and consumer demand, should also be taken into account. While evaluating each option, it is important to consider features like agility and scalability.
No matter how many people are in an organization, it may be necessary to have more skills. It is important to find a modernization partner who has experience in order to maximize efficiency, reduce chaos and move the initiative towards the desired outcomes.
Monitor, Observe, And Optimize
Most organizations do not place a high priority on Application Modernization. Their internal teams might need additional skills and resources in order to make the right decisions about modernization, cloud or microservices support. It is important to partner with an experienced software services provider who specializes in digital transformation and has expertise in reengineering systems, technology, and processes with various modernization methods.
To maximize time to market, the team should use Agile and DevOps. Chief architects and executives at the C-level are essential in leading this initiative. They will be supported by project managers, technologists and implementation leads, as well as security and compliance experts.
Read More: What Is Modern Vs Legacy Applications?
Benefits Of Modernization With Cloud-N
Modernization services can be used by an enterprise for many reasons. This list contains a number of important use cases that companies must achieve in order to remain agile, meet customer expectations and maintain competitive advantage.
Improved Security
The most important enterprise software applications have a "use-by" date. As digital transformation became a priority for businesses, many departments adopted applications without checking their security. As legacy code in these applications accumulates, it becomes a hindrance and prevents teams from being innovative. Monolithic legacy applications are reliant on outdated frameworks, libraries and operating systems. This creates problems for the DevOps teams when they deploy these applications to newer software architectures. They are forced to spend resources to understand and integrate legacy code.
The legacy code was also not written according to standard procedures and may have security issues that are difficult to fix. These issues make your system vulnerable to cyber and security threats. This type of vulnerability is exploited by many viruses. Attackers are actively targeting the public cloud infrastructure. Only the most advanced security can protect critical business infrastructure in these scenarios.
Modernizing applications allows businesses to move from in-out, or vice versa, with new tools, technologies and frameworks. They can even drop out-of-date applications that no longer serve their purpose. Modernizing older applications can improve the quality of data in workflows since everything from software development to customer service depends on data integrity. Older systems can cause bottlenecks in organizations, which are often the reason for new projects being compromised.
Increase Developer Productivity
Developers are faced with interruptions and rework when using aging systems. This creates a worse experience for them. This is a very common scenario and can be frustrating for teams and developers who are using legacy applications and traditional application development methods. This is preventing them from innovating and causing a reduction in development productivity and performance improvements as they spend the majority of their time fixing old code.
Modern application development practices are more focused on portability than the traditional approach. In addition, modern tools such as IaaS or PaaS solutions automate the deployments of workloads into the best environments. By adapting to the new development practices of DevOps and automating processes, developers can get feedback in real-time or even while they are still thinking about their code. Automation would change the way their days and weeks look.
Accelerate Software Development And Deployment
Agile development allows companies to achieve continuous integration and development. Agile development helped businesses and developers improve their productivity, but the process of deploying applications remains manual. The companies were far from providing better customer experiences or innovating quicker when their customers needed it.
Continuous deployment is a necessity to speed up software delivery in tandem with agile software development. Modernizing monolithic applications, breaking them down into microservices and event-driven and reactive applications while using advanced deployment mechanisms like containers and serverless reduces the size of these applications and makes them portable. It accelerates not only the development cycle but also automated deployment.
IoT/Edge Computing
Businesses can leverage IoT benefits by using microservices, serverless computing, ephemeral services, and edge computing. Internet of Things is a term used to describe smart devices that are connected to a network and can send and receive data. These devices produce a large amount of data that needs to be analyzed and processed. Edge computing allows computing to take place at the site where data is collected. This enables IoT data collection and processing. This reduces the need to transmit data to a cloud or data center.
Modernization is important when it comes to applications. It is possible to consider an application legacy' if it was built using mainframe technology or COBOL. For IoT/Edge computing, Java apps and their app servers are a legacy. Java architectures use an archive file to package apps and represent the whole application. This type of application architecture makes it impossible to change a single element. This architecture complicates scaling, reduces latency and wastes resources.
Modern application development methods are therefore essential, as they abstract capabilities, allowing independent modification and enhancements of an application element. Microservices and serverless architectures, and computing models are flexible and agile enough to support workloads.
Reliability/Availability/Scalability
Not all organizations prioritize application modernization to optimize costs. Some organizations have much bigger goals, such as the Reliability and stability of their system, Reliability of digital services and scalability to better utilize resources. To meet their business objectives, organizations look for migration and optimization solutions. Businesses choose the best application modernization method based on their unique business case. Organizations use a variety of methods, including lifting and shifting, refactoring or rearchitecting and rebuilding.
Support Cloud Native, Microservices Architecture
Cloud computing was initially seen as an alternative to data centers by companies. The companies moved their workloads to the cloud. Because companies have not adopted cloud computing as part of their core business strategy, the gains they made were marginal and they are still unable to unlock the full benefits. The native cloud skills are not developed by lift and shift projects. It's difficult to get more value out of a legacy workload, and still achieve cloud-native application benefits such as automated performance management and stability.
The application architecture is the same for both on-premises and cloud deployments. They are not designed for horizontal scaling, so they can't increase or decrease their capacity to meet changing loads. You may need to use larger cloud servers in order to handle the load. This is similar to what you would do on-premises. You will be billed for a wide range of resources even if you don't use them all. Companies are therefore modernizing and transforming their applications to become cloud-native so that they can be reliable, scalable and secure from the start, as well as cost-optimized.
Modernization Of Data
Legacy data is old data that has been buried but still contains vital information. These data are stored for years and become disorganized, segmented and siloed. Over time, it makes the management and processing of legacy data a cumbersome task. It encourages moving legacy databases into modern environments.
Many companies have moved away from the data architecture of enterprise data warehouses based on Hadoop and open-source tools. They may not have completely eliminated the warehouses because these storage options for structured data are still valuable in many applications. These companies adapt to modernize data to support new business processes and mobile applications with improved efficiency. Modern or cloud-based platforms allow organizations to access the resources required by big data enterprise applications.
Improve App Development Speed/Time To Market
Digital trends, remote working, and increasing customer expectations are some of the reasons why business leaders feel pressured to drive innovation. When businesses modernize their application environment, application modernization can help them achieve their goals. It drives new processes and infrastructure that will accelerate innovation, go to market quicker, and reduce maintenance costs.
Reduce Infrastructure Costs/Improve Efficiency
Adopting certain modern application development practices makes infrastructure management even more effortless. Serverless platforms like AWS Lambda or Azure don't require management, nor do they need to worry about running, such as configuring networks, allocating storage and provisioning cloud services instances. Companies can boost their development teams' productivity by leveraging these tools.
This increased efficiency allows the development team to maintain their competitive edge and deliver new features to clients. Cloud-based and cloud-native solutions also help to reduce infrastructure costs. Serverless architecture, for example, charges organizations for the triggered event in addition to the cloud pricing advantage of the pay-as-you-go.
Move Off Old/Unsupported Operating Systems
Even operating systems and servers have a lifespan. The end of support also means that regular security updates will no longer be available for the affected operating systems and application performance, leaving them vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Risks Of Modernization
You may be trying to save money by using legacy applications. But there are risks. Check out these:
Software Compatibility
The most recent OSes are used to develop modern applications. Your IT infrastructure prevents you from upgrading to the latest systems. You are forced to use legacy applications.
Compliance Issues
Many countries and states have created and implemented a standard for the use and storage of data. If a company is dealing with sensitive information, such as in healthcare or e-commerce, they are required to update their systems. Operating these industries on an OS that is ten years old or with an insecure or complex application can result in not only security lapses but also large fines, shutdowns of companies, or even jail time.
High Operating Costs
The cost of maintaining and fixing bugs in applications that run on post-EOD versions is high. Microsoft's cost to patch an EOL OS is also a significant amount of money. Imagine the cost of maintaining an app that is mission-critical if it were to fail.
Poor Performance And Reliability
You may also have old workstations and servers in your office if you run your business using legacy apps or older versions of Windows. You may have experienced this yourself. This increases your risk and can lead to more downtime.
Software or OSes that are outdated can cause problems in terms of security, compatibility and compliance. Continuous modernization of business software is important for many reasons: It keeps your IT up to date and gives you the ability to grow at the pace you desire.
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Conclusion
Many organizations still use legacy systems. Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption are, therefore, another driving force behind the modernization of applications, as they promise organizations smooth processes and the scaling up of traditional or cloud native systems.
