The digital revolution has reshaped the IT domain, demanding a shift from outdated legacy systems to agile application modernization. Yet, many organizations still need to grapple with the challenge of navigating this new digital frontier while being anchored by monolithic legacy infrastructure.
Surprisingly, a significant portion of today’s IT infrastructure—31%, according to a recent survey—is still composed of legacy systems. Even more startling is that only 33% of technology in large enterprises has been modernized to meet the demands of the digital age. These aging systems, built for a different era, often lack the flexibility and agility to thrive in the digital domain. They were never designed to support the dynamic, composite applications now essential for business success.
The pandemic has only intensified the urgency for digital transformation. As businesses pivot to adapt to new realities, the need for robust application modernization has become more apparent than ever. But modernization isn’t just about upgrading technology; it’s about reimagining your entire IT infrastructure to support innovation, efficiency, and growth.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is the principle of updating legacy applications’ and modernizing their internal architecture, platform infrastructure, and functionalities. Today, much of the conversation about cloud application modernization centers on monolithic, on-premises applications that are typically updated and maintained using waterfall development processes and how those applications can be adapted to cloud architecture and release patterns, specifically microservices DevOps.
Application modernization roadmap entails consolidating, repurposing, or restructuring old programming or software code to extract additional business value from the existing application and better align it with the needs of the current business environment.
The primary goal of many applications’ IT modernization strategy is to transform monolithic, on-premises systems into cloud-native design and release patterns. In particular, modern application development methods like DevOps and microservices employ waterfall software product modernization development methods instead of onsite maintenance and updating.
This is a crucial stage since fulfilling new business requirements while maintaining the functionality of legacy programs takes a lot of time and resources. Moreover, when software becomes incompatible with modern systems due to age, this problem gets worse.
Why Application Modernization Matters
1) Enhanced Agility and Flexibility
Modern applications are built to be nimble, allowing your organization to swiftly respond to evolving market application modernization benefits, customer demands, and technological advancements. Legacy systems, on the other hand, often hinder innovation, trapping your business in outdated processes and limiting your ability to respond to new opportunities.
2) Improved Operational Efficiency
Application modernization can streamline your operations, reduce maintenance costs, and eliminate the inefficiencies associated with legacy systems. This boosts your bottom line and liberates resources to concentrate on key strategies that fuel growth.
3) Seamless Integration
In today’s interconnected world, integrating various applications and systems is crucial. Modern applications are designed to work seamlessly with other tools, platforms, and services, enabling you to create a cohesive IT ecosystem that supports your business objectives.
4) Increased Security and Compliance
Legacy systems often need more robust security features to protect against modern threats. An application modernization roadmap allows you to incorporate the latest security protocols, keeping your data secure and your organization compliant with industry regulations.
5) Enhanced Customer Experience
Today’s customers expect fast, personalized, and reliable digital experiences. Modern applications enable you to deliver on these expectations, offering a superior user experience that can set you apart from the competition.
Also Read: What are the five steps in creating an application modernization strategy?
Application Modernization Services
Legacy modernization services provide additional capabilities for the business to address some of the issues mentioned above during the transition from legacy to new platforms. These services provide options for interoperability, re-architecting, recoding, re-engineering, re-hosting, replacement, re-platforming, and retirement. They also offer legacy software modernization and clarifications to the application architecture.
Application Modernization Tools
There are several instances of application modernization tools. Some are as follows:
1) Containers and Kubernetes
These allow developers to create scalable, reliable, adaptable app modernization for various settings.
2) Cloud Native Computing
This model runs operations off-site in the cloud. Cloud-native technology outsources software code to the cloud provider, though it does not eliminate the requirement for a server. The code is then executed as each request comes in.
3) Monolith to Application Modernization Microservices
Many advantages drive the shift from monolithic applications to more effective microservices. Because application components are no longer packaged together, using microservices makes updates more accessible and less expensive from an architectural standpoint.
Application Modernization Challenges
Any application modernization challenges faces numerous inherent difficulties, and each of these issues affects the quest for the best application modernization vendors for a specific enterprise. These difficulties include the following:
1) In the Long Run, Projects Lead to Vendor Lock-in
Organizations may have to choose a single container or cloud vendor while modernizing apps drags on, which might lead to unexpected cost hikes in the future.
2) By Design, Monoliths are Hard to Break
Modernizing earlier versions of many software such as Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, or Siebel is challenging because these were made to be impenetrable monoliths. In other words, these legacy modernization apps, along with the data, networking settings, and security they use, frequently have a close relationship with the underlying infrastructure. Due to their intimate connection, it is challenging to upgrade individual program components; even little upgrades can start a lengthy, complicated process.
3) Application Siloing
Application silos frequently exist within larger businesses. For instance, various business units may set up and run the same applications on an entirely different infrastructure. This makes testing more challenging and increases the difficulty of IT’s efforts to consolidate and optimize the infrastructure 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. In addition, most IT operations teams find it challenging to integrate multiple overlapping product points into a cohesive mesh of application delivery services because they find it overwhelming to master this avalanche of tools and the vendor contracts accompanying them.
The Legacy Conundrum
IT companies that depend on legacy modernization applications often encounter hurdles like incompatibility, undesired maintenance costs, and a scarcity of legacy coders. These obstacles hinder organizations’ abilities to achieve complete digital transformation effectively. Fanning the flames are the integration challenges the legacy application brings along. Legacy apps are hard to integrate with modern technologies like AI, IoT, and Cloud.
The statistical insights indicate:
- 90% of businesses are impeded from harnessing the full potential of digital technologies due to their reliance on legacy applications
- 65% of businesses believe that legacy system modernization is incapable of addressing the emerging requirements of the digital business
- 88% of IT leaders agree that modernized IT systems are critical to meet emerging digital business demands
- 80% believe that not modernizing IT systems will negatively impact the long-term growth of their organization
Also Read: The Comprehensive Guide to Intelligent Process Automation Across Industries
Application Modernization: Breaking the Legacy Conundrum
In a nutshell, cloud application modernization is updating existing legacy applications or building entirely new ones to better align with business objectives. Modernizing helps organizations stave off legacy code and exploit new, innovative tech. Rearchitecting legacy modernization applications enables organizations to realize the much-needed flexibility and agility to address imperative business requirements and seize opportunities for future growth.
Why modernize your legacy applications?
- 15-35% infrastructure year-over-year savings
- 30-50% lower application maintenance and running costs
- 74% lower costs on hardware, software, and staff
- 10% improvement in application operational efficiency
- 14% boost in annual revenue, which equates to USD 1 billion on average for large organizations
Let’s look at some of the potential benefits that application modernization brings along:
The Business Benefits of Application Modernization
1) Competitive Edge
While your competitors are still pondering, you can reap the advantages of a head start by embracing application cloud modernization. Take the leap of faith by modernizing the applications, doubling your organization’s digital adoption. Cloud modernization enables your organization to integrate modern platforms and technologies and outpace laggards.
2) Enhanced compatibility
Modernizing legacy applications enhances interoperability with new technologies, platforms, and code. It also enables organizations to integrate their applications seamlessly and be better positioned to meet current and future business demands.
3) Cloud-native
Cloud modernization aids organizations in re-engineering their legacy applications to include cloud-native applications. This enables you to embrace cloud benefits like faster speed to market, scalability, agility, and lower costs.
4) Better efficiencies
Modernizing applications improves process efficiencies and business performance. App modernization can be updated frequently and refined with bug fixes and security patches. Modernization ushers in operational simplicity and alleviates the burden on IT operations.
5) Robust security
In a recent survey, 87% of IT decision-makers admitted that legacy applications make businesses more vulnerable to security threats. Obsolete applications are incompatible with modern security standards and authentication methods. Modernizing your applications can drastically wick off security vulnerabilities that legacy systems pose.
6) Improved user satisfaction
Whether your employees or customers use legacy applications can be a hassle. Modernizing applications with a refined user-facing interface, leading-edge functionalities, and innovative features will improve customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
7) Staying relevant
Application cloud modernization enables organizations to make the most of digital technologies, including AI, machine learning, big data, and cloud. It helps transform your IT ecosystem based on current market trends and build a flexible foundation for future innovation.
8) Productivity boost
According to IBM, updating legacy could boost developers’ productivity by as much as 40%. Modernizing applications and facilitating access to better developer services can help make engineering teams more productive and enhance time-to-market.
Also Read: How Veritis Anticipates and Resolves Financial Service Challenges
Latest Trends in Application Modernization
As businesses evolve in the digital age, application modernization has become a critical priority. Here are some of the latest application modernization benefits driving this transformation:
1) Adoption of Cloud-native Technologies
Cloud-native architectures are at the forefront of application modernization. By leveraging containerization (e.g., Docker), microservices, and serverless computing, organizations can build and deploy highly scalable, resilient, and optimized applications for cloud environments. This approach enables faster deployment cycles and boosts adaptability to evolving business requirements.
2) Emphasis on DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
Integrating DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines into the application development lifecycle accelerates modernization efforts. These practices break down silos between development and operations teams, enabling more efficient collaboration and automated testing and accelerating the rollout of new features and updates. This shift towards continuous improvement and delivery is essential for maintaining competitive agility.
3) API-first Development
API-first development is gaining traction as organizations recognize the necessity for smooth integration and compatibility across various systems and applications. By designing APIs as foundational elements, businesses can ensure that their applications are modular, flexible, and easily adaptable to new technologies and platforms.
4) Focus on Security and Compliance
As cyber threats grow, ensuring robust security has become central to application modernization. Organizations are adopting advanced security frameworks and integrating security practices (DevSecOps) into the development lifecycle to protect their modernized applications. Securing adherence to data protection laws, like GDPR and CCPA, drives the need for secure application design.
5) Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning (ML) are being integrated into modernized applications to enhance functionality and provide predictive insights. Whether it’s automating decision-making processes, personalizing user experiences, or optimizing business operations, AI and ML are becoming key components of modern applications.
6) Hybrid and Multi-cloud Strategies
Many firms are adopting hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in and leverage different cloud providers’ best features. This process allows businesses to distribute workloads across multiple cloud environments, optimizing performance, cost, and resilience. Application modernization efforts increasingly focus on ensuring compatibility and portability across these diverse environments.
7) Low-code/No-code Platforms
Low-code and no-code development platforms revolutionize application modernization by permitting business users and developers to build and deploy applications with minimal coding. These platforms accelerate the modernization process by simplifying the development of new features and integrations, making keeping pace with business demands easier.
8) Application Refactoring and Re-platforming
Rather than completely replacing legacy systems, many organizations opt for application refactoring or re-platforming as a more cost-effective approach to modernization. This involves modifying existing applications to fit modern infrastructure better (e.g., moving from monolithic to microservices architecture) or migrating them to more modern platforms (e.g., from on-premises to cloud).
9) Increased Focus on User Experience (UX)
Modernization efforts are increasingly centered around improving the user experience. This trend highlights the need for adaptive design, intuitive interfaces, and personalized experiences to engage customers and drive business success in the digital domain.
10) Edge Computing
As IoT devices proliferate, edge computing is becoming a significant trend in application modernization. By processing data closer to where it is generated, edge computing reduces latency. It enhances the performance of applications relying on real-time data, making it a key enabler for modern healthcare, manufacturing, and finance applications.
The Right Course
Though there are many approaches to legacy application modernization, each organization must choose the course that aligns with its strategic priorities. Modernization approaches may have benefits, but software product modernization is costly, complex, and challenging. Partnering with an external service provider like Veritis is a more efficient option for achieving solutions.
Veritis, the American Business Award, and Globee Business Award winners are uniquely positioned to help you plan and implement the right modernization solutions based on your current and future business needs. Our application modernization services offer an iterative, low-risk approach to building, modernizing, and managing applications securely across hybrid cloud environments. Reach out to us to enhance the value of your existing apps and reduce their maintenance cost.
Got Questions? Schedule A Call
More Articles: