Why Digital Businesses Should Prioritize Legacy Application Modernization

Since technologies progress at an incredible pace, enterprises are looking for restructuring their existing legacy systems & applications to retain customers, drive growth, and stay competitive. Because, using legacy outdated systems typically results in poor scalability and performance, which limits innovation capabilities for organizations. Simply put, a failure to update legacy applications can hold a business back.

Introduction to Legacy Application Modernization

Legacy application modernization is the procedure of re-architecting, upgrading, or swapping present legacy applications that have become obsolete to the point that they no more function effectively and fail to fulfill business objectives. Typically, it helps businesses to avoid all risks and challenges of an outdated system.

The legacy application requires some significant resource investment for its maintenance, and it’s very hard to find an experienced specialist who can maintain the outdated system. Moreover, it’s difficult to integrate legacy applications with new systems and features as there is a major risk that it would crash at any instance and disrupt the business’s internal processes. Such an application is so inflexible, so implementing any enhancements is almost impossible. Therefore, to overcome this barrier and reduce significant technical debt, businesses should partner with the right application modernization service provider.

Key Technologies Used For Legacy Application Modernization

Cloud

Cloud migration is different from modernization. Migrating a legacy application means Lifting and Shifting old infrastructure and moving to the Cloud. Though this approach offers potential cost and productivity benefits, it fails to give enterprise applications a growth perspective. Whereas, Cloud modernization means breaking down legacy applications into component parts and upgrading each of those parts according to Cloud standards.

Therefore, modernization can augment overall business operations and give legacy applications a greater growth perspective. Modernizing legacy applications with Cloud platforms like AWS & Azure can reduce maintenance costs, gain efficiencies and help businesses make the most of investments. Modernization can enhance communication & collaboration across teams and give rise to better-controlled workflows and processes. The real-time insights that an enterprise gains via Cloud adoption help them respond to problems faster and meet user demands effectively.

Containers

Another way of modernization is that legacy applications can be packaged, deployed, and operated using containers. Containers make sure that the legacy app always runs securely and smoothly regardless of the ecosystem it runs in. In simple, a container is a software-defined environment, which has everything an application needs to operate like tools, code, and libraries. Containerization makes it effective to package a legacy app reliably and in a lightweight manner to function across Cloud, workstations, or on-site environments steadily.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration platform for automating the scaling, deployment, and management of containerized legacy applications. It works like an operating system. A Kubernetes cluster involves a control plane and worker nodes that help businesses manage applications and workloads. It can also effectively monitor the applications, regularly update them with newer versions, and automatically restart applications if they fail. Kubernetes can take consistent backups of the application data, ensuring better business continuity.

Benefits of Legacy Application Modernization

1. Real-Time Data Accessibility

Data is crucial for enterprises to thrive in today’s competitive and fast-paced market. Transferring from an outdated, legacy system to a modern ecosystem allows the workforce to access a huge volume of business data in real time.  Instant data backup is another advantage of legacy application modernization. When enterprise applications and workloads run on a Cloud platform, the organization’s data will be stored on the Cloud securely, ensuring immediate backup in case of any unexpected downtimes.

2. Reduces Manual Intervention and Enhances User Experience

Since legacy app modernization comes together with automation, it will substantially reduce the number of resources required to manage and monitor application operation and performance. Automation further lessens manual errors and inaccuracies associated with legacy operations. By teaming up with the right software modernization services provider, business users & teams can leverage modern technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their user experience. For instance, revamping web/ mobile applications using AI-driven Chatbots can improve user interaction and offer an intuitive experience.

3. Strong Compliance Maintenance

In the dynamic environment, fulfilling compliance is vital for every organization. With the ever-changing regulatory variations, it is quite challenging for legacy application-operating enterprises to fulfill the evolving compliances.

For example, consider a supply chain management enterprise that utilizes legacy applications for delivering services across the globe. At some stage, the company fails to meet regulatory compliances of some countries, and non-compliance results in massive financial losses.

Therefore, modernizing legacy supply chain management applications using innovative technologies like IoT, Cloud, Big Data, and AI can help the enterprise to uphold better compliance, eliminate hindrances, and gain higher productivity.

4. Offer New Revenue Stream

Strengthening revenue is the eventual goal of any organization. While using legacy applications or systems, organizations will be confined within a certain geographic location and cannot uncover newer means of revenue generation.  Growth and innovation are entangled in modern technologies. Hence, by hiring the right modernization service provider, organizations can adopt agile business models, which help them build revenue than operating on conventional systems.

Wrapping Up

In general, the decade-old legacy applications are not going to offer any value to enterprises in the upcoming times. Implementing legacy modernization can help businesses to grow and identify many new opportunities. However, before modernizing the existing IT systems, enterprises need to define & document their requirements and objectives. Experts from the right technology company can understand business needs precisely and help seamlessly digitize operations.