With changing times, legacy systems are becoming increasingly irrelevant and hard to maintain. Many organizations still utilize systems built on outdated software languages and irrelevant hardware parts, which has increased cybersecurity risk, with efficiency taking a real hit.
Though application modernization is a time-consuming procedure and comes without its challenges, the benefits of undertaking this venture are numerous, and here are the five best practices to follow:
Developing an Application Modernization Strategy
1) Listing out the crucial applications
Organizations must first list their high-value assets and analyze how they could benefit from better scalability, security, and performance. They must also list the usability, problem areas addressed, and maintenance costs it incurs and understand how modernization would prove beneficial.
Once these points are identified, organizations must narrow down application specifics, such as who needs to leverage it, its capabilities, and limitations in terms of performance and function. Though hard data helps develop these insights, it is imperative to get the inputs of those dealing with the application or who are using it.
Through this information, leaders can make crucial decisions about the investment in specific applications and then setting goals and priorities to initiate modernization for the best results.
2) Analyze the resources
Since application modernization is a technical and organizational change, it is important to devise successful strategies for ensuring both occur.
To start the organizational transformation journey, organizations must identify leaders who grasp the application environment and measure the overall impact of changes at different levels of organization, processes, and technology. This signifies developing a firm understanding of the application, its connection to various sources (other applications or networks), and its maintenance procedures.
The team’s skill sets must be considered in order to understand modern application development methods and how IT could support the mission.
3) Devise an approach
Numerous approaches must be considered, ranging from adding new features to the current architecture to understanding how it aligns with the end user’s needs. Today, developing and managing applications has become easy through containers, microservices, and the cloud.
Application modernization and cloud migration help technical challenges by enabling applications to scale up elastically.
4) Measuring improvements in performance
After completing the initial modernization phase, monitoring infrastructure and applications up to the code level is essential to ensure quality application performance. The infrastructure must be examined for issues and errors with the cloud, database, network, and code to understand how they impact end-user performance or business continuity.
Organizations need to measure application performance post-modernization to understand the outcome in terms of how the application functionality has changed and ensured optimization.
5) Process change
Once all the factors have been weighed in, organizations still fail to modernize their legacy systems due to cost overruns, project failures, and delays. Modernizing application infrastructure requires careful planning, adopting quality practices, and developing code with those who understand the bigger picture.
Conclusion
At Veritis, we help you devise a data-driven approach to developing an application modernization strategy that meets your business requirements and offers a quality client experience. We are a US-based IT services provider that has delivered high-value and cost-effective solutions to clients, including Fortune 500 firms, for nearly a decade.
