Application Modernization
Elevate your software portfolio with application modernization services that reduce costs and improve performance .
Think about driving an older car. When you first bought it, it had all the amenities you wanted and was perfect for getting to and from work, running errands, and going on the occasional road trip. Cut to several years later, and years and use have taken its toll on the engine. You still need your car and use it every day, but the gas mileage is terrible, the acceleration is sluggish, and sometimes it even stalls out.
Obviously, keeping the car in its current condition is unsustainable, but you don’t want to junk it and deal with the hassle and cost of buying a new car. Instead, you look at rebuilding your engine which will make the car more efficient, drive better, and save you a lot of money in maintenance and fuel costs. Overall, you feel this is a great solution to the problem.
Relying on outdated systems and applications is like driving a car with a bad engine. They slow down productivity, increase your IT costs, and put you at risk of security threats. But you need these applications, so what is the best solution to this problem?
More companies are turning to application modernization to update legacy software and systems to meet the evolving needs of a growing organization. This process breaks down complex architecture to easily update the code and add functionality while migrating it to a cloud platform. The result? A better-performing, more flexible, secure, scalable application that can evolve and grow with your organization.
While every organization’s technology needs are different, application modernization offers a customized approach to the solutions you’re looking for. In this guide, we’ll cut through the confusion and give you a clear path forward.
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The Challenges of Legacy Applications
Your business probably relies on at least one legacy application that you could depend on to meet the needs you had in the past. However, as your business changed and technology advanced, how well has that application kept up? In many cases, legacy systems get in the way of current objectives and may even cause more problems than they solve, such as:
- An outdated architecture siloes data and makes business intelligence endeavors difficult or impossible
- The maintenance and management costs increase each year and take up more of your IT department’s valuable time
- Industry regulations have changed, and your application may not be compliant.
- Even simple updates require taking the entire application down, causing lost productivity throughout the company
- Your business has grown, and your application can't scale to fit your new realities
Even though your organization relies on a legacy application, it’s not sustainable in its existing state. Legacy application modernization offers an alternative to replacing a system, so you can keep the functionality you need while updating it to better suit your business’s evolution.
Drivers for Application Modernization
Your organization is probably already using cloud technology solutions in some form, most likely SaaS, such as Microsoft 365, Slack, or Salesforce CRM, but you may be hesitant to take the bigger step toward moving all your applications and systems to cloud infrastructure. While you may be concerned with initial investment, security risks, or other factors, let’s consider the drivers for businesses to abandon on-premises solutions and transition to the cloud.
Cost
Even though there is a financial investment to modernizing your legacy applications, many businesses do see a significant ROI after transitioning to cloud infrastructure in several ways:
- Reduced costs of ownership as cloud technology eliminates significant hardware replacement costs as well as maintenance and management expenses
- Paying only for what you need with on-demand cloud solutions instead of having to predict your business’s needs for the future
- Improved outcomes from your IT team who can re-focus on tech-related growth strategies and solutions instead of putting out fires and keeping outdated systems limping along
- Subscription-based pricing aligns IT costs with budgetary needs
Scalability
The cloud allows you to scale hardware, such as adding or removing servers depending on your business needs. While scaling software does present challenges without the right framework in place, data virtualization within an actor framework offers a robust, elegant solution to scaling software so it can support more users, increase functionality, and deliver a more agile performance.
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Agility
Being able to adapt, change, and pivot is essential in today’s business, especially at the enterprise level, but agility is impossible to achieve when your business applications can’t keep up. Cloud computing supports business agility in several ways:
- Reduces the time needed to provision or de-provision IT infrastructure and increases IT’s delivery speed
- Supports the ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch software applications that can add value to the business
- Allows you to quickly upgrade software to meet business needs
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Risk
Protecting legacy systems where technical support and updates are minimal or nonexistent makes it difficult to shore up security at every touchpoint. With application modernization, developers integrate new security features and can deploy updates regularly while public cloud offerings also have security protocols in place, creating multiple lines of security to protect data.
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Leveraging Cloud Technology
Modernizing your systems and applications requires relocating them, in some form, to the cloud, so let’s take a more in-depth look at cloud technology.
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Cloud Solutions
Applications are delivered through the cloud via one of three paradigms:
- Software as a Service (SaaS) is an application or product managed entirely by a third-party provider, such as Salesforce CRM or Microsoft Office 365. This option is usually best for replacing an obsolete application completely with a product already available to suit the business’s needs.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a framework on which a developer can build a custom application. While your company manages the data and code, the third party manages the infrastructure. This option is ideal when you want to invest in and build a new application that is customized to serve the core line of your organization or deliver value to your customers.
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- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is used for moving and modernizing your on-premise virtual machines to a cloud architecture. While the vendor, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, manages virtualization, servers, and storage, your company manages applications, data, middleware, and operating systems. This implementation is often best for updating and migrating existing applications.
Dig deeper into public cloud offerings and find the right option for your company
When moving a legacy system or infrastructure from its existing location to the cloud, you would most likely choose IaaS to get the best results.
Cloud Migration vs. Modernization
Cloud migration is a possible option if you simply want to take a system or application in its existing form and move it to the cloud (called “lift and shift”). This may be ideal for a small-scale business, but in most cases, only choosing cloud migration will limit the full potential of the application.
By coupling migration with modernization, where you determine the right strategies to update the application, such as replatforming or refactoring, you can maximize its functionality, increase efficiency, or improve insights from the data it collects.
Cloud Technologies
When choosing application modernization solutions, it’s important to understand the intersecting technologies that are essential to modernizing legacy applications.
- Containers: Containers are isolated, abstract packages of software that hold everything needed to run an application and decouple applications from their environment so they can deploy in any setting. They are similar to a virtual machine but are a lightweight alternative that is ideal for deploying in a public cloud or private datacenter. Containerization is the method by which applications are packaged, deployed, and operated.
- Microservices: Microservices are an architectural and organizational approach to modernizing or creating cloud applications and are basically the opposite of a monolithic application. A monolithic architecture is one network with one code base, so any errors, changes, or updates affect the entire structure, making it less reliable, scalable, and agile. Microservices are individual, independent services that run processes separately and communicate through APIs. Because each microservice is its own entity, developers can work on each service without disrupting the others, creating an agile, scalable solution that is independently and continuously deployable.
- Orchestration: Orchestration in software development refers to automating containers’ operational tasks, such as deployment and networking.
- Kubernetes: Kubernetes, or k8s, is an open-source platform that orchestrates container operations, coordinating and executing multiple steps in a workflow or pipeline like monitoring, deploying, or scaling an application. Kubernetes also makes it possible to deploy containers at scale, such as in the case of microservices.
Building a Modernization Roadmap
Your organization did the research, weighed the benefits against the challenges, and decided to move forward with application modernization. Now, you need a modernization roadmap that will put you on the path to meeting your goals and ensuring a smooth transition to cloud computing.
Any successful project requires you to sit down with your team and develop an initial strategy. More specifically, do you plan to take on the modernization project internally or should you bring in a third party for application modernization services? If you do choose to bring in a third party, to what extent will they be present? You may only need them to help you build your roadmap and make suggestions for choosing the right SaaS or IaaS, or you may choose to turn the project over to them completely.
If you choose to do some or even all the work internally, it’s important to follow these steps:
Audit and Assess
Before you begin, you need to understand what kind of legacy systems and applications you’re working with and how to best move them to a cloud infrastructure, so it’s essential to start with a thorough assessment. This includes taking inventory of your hardware, software, and infrastructure and determining what’s working and what isn’t working. You will need to understand your technical needs by reviewing the codebase, testing the systems, and verifying security.
During this stage, you’ll also want to assess other factors, including:
- Realistic cost of the modernization project
- How long the process will take
- Any possible service disruption and how it will affect business
- The specific use case that will guide your strategy, such as refactoring an application to improve security or replatforming to scale the infrastructure to support increased traffic and usage
Set Goals and Progress Markers
Once you understand your issues, know your objectives, and have a defined use case, we recommend you set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant/realistic, time-bound) goals to track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction.
As you set goals and hone your objectives, it’s important to keep in mind the importance of creating a quality-first environment. Like setting a use case, prioritizing quality will help you avoid common pitfalls in your application modernization project.
Discover how to create a quality-first culture and why it’s key for a legacy system modernization
Perform a SWOT Analysis
Understanding and analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the project before it begins will help you identify where you may experience roadblocks or how you can leverage advantages.
Create a Modernization plan
Once you know the scope of the project, your objectives for the outcome, and the timeline and budget, it’s time to put a plan into place for how you’re going to carry out the project.
Above, we mentioned cloud migration, or “lift and shift” where developers move the application to the cloud infrastructure without updating the code or functionality. This is also referred to as rehosting, and it is only one option available to modernizing a legacy application. Other options include:
- Encapsulation: Changing the interface of the legacy system while keeping the functionality and operations the same by reusing the main components and using APIs to connect the old components to new access layers
- Replatform: Moving the application to a new runtime platform, updating the code itself but not the code structure, functions, or features
- Refactor: Restructuring the code to eliminate technical debt and improve its nonfunctional attributes while ensuring the app’s external behavior stays the same
- Rearchitect: Changing the code significantly before moving it to a new application architecture in order to leverage new and improved capabilities
- Rebuild: Keeping the scope and specifications of the application the same while rewriting the components from scratch
While deciding which option is best may seem difficult, it’s important to look at each outcome’s effect on your technology stack, IT costs, and security as well as seeing which option will best suit the determined use case.
Challenges to Avoid When Modernizing Legacy Applications
Although application modernization is essential for most businesses to maintain and improve operations, it’s not a simple process. Even more frustrating is that, if not implemented correctly, the project won’t achieve the goals your organization set out. To avoid an overly drawn-out project that leaves you wondering if you made a mistake, let’s look at the common pitfalls many businesses face and how to avoid them.
Lack of Stakeholder Support
Stakeholder buy-in is essential for a successful legacy modernization project. Without it, you’re unlikely to get the resources you need, including budget, staff, and time. Having a clear use case, realistic goals, and an in-depth understanding of what your project will need (such as licensing, SaaS, IaaS, etc) to maximize ROI will help stakeholders see the importance of the project and provide support.
Failing to Address Cost Concerns
Whether you’re hiring a third party to provide application modernization services or are keeping the project internal, you’ll need a clear, realistic budget. Providing reliable, comprehensive information related to costs and being able to justify those costs with sound reasoning and data will help executives understand the value of system modernization and release the funds necessary to achieve the best outcome for your organization.
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Planning for Today and Tomorrow
Replatforming, refactoring, or rebuilding your applications and systems is a large-scale project. To maximize your ROI and ensure long-term stability and agility, it’s important to consider your organization’s current and future needs. While one of the main benefits of shifting to the cloud is being able to scale on demand, you also want to factor in processes and workflows to ensure that your environment keeps up with your organization’s growth.
Modernizing Everything at Once
It’s understandable to want to complete a tech project as quickly as possible, and that may seem like shifting, rebuilding, or replacing everything at the same time. However, keeping a legacy system operating while working on a new system or making gradual changes will simplify the process, minimize outages, and keep the process moving more smoothly.
Taking a phased approach to legacy application modernization
Failing to Set Expectations
While modernization offers multiple benefits for organizations, it’s also important to set realistic expectations related to the process, including budget, time, business interruption, and results. Again, having a use case in place to build your modernization strategy around while communicating realistic outcomes to stakeholders is key as well as setting SMART goals through the process and checking in to see if and how goals are being met.
Taking the Next Steps
Application modernization offers valuable benefits for businesses who are relying on legacy systems for mission-critical functions. However, it can be incredibly difficult to know how to get the project off the ground, or what your roadmap should look like. That’s where we can help. Reach out to us with any questions or concerns, and we’ll make sure you have the answers you need. Let’s get started >>
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