The need for digital transformation amongst organizations post-pandemic along with the need to have an agile and scalable IT environment to meet the ever-growing customer needs has effectuated the need to brush up the legacy systems that are blurred by monolithic architecture. This process of rephrasing the platform architecture, internal architecture, existing features is called application modernization. It often combines with digital transformation and cloud migration for the organizations to ramp up their game and adopt application modernization to stay ahead of their competitors.
This calls for forficating legacy applications into individual functions so that every function runs on its own with the help of containers, making the framework agile, faster to deploy, independent and scalable.
Components of Application Modernization
Application modernization is not just about transforming off-line business processes to digital but leveraging legacy applications to create micro-services of individual functions to enhance productivity and reduce costs.
Businesses pivot the underlying architecture from monoliths to micro-services, migrating from physical servers to cloud computing and moving the delivery method from waterfall (basic) to DevOps (advanced).
3 R’s of Application Modernization
Businesses with different capital appetites follow different strategies. Let’s look at the 3 R of application modernization:
- Re-Host: Based on the “lift-and-shift” model it requires lifting the existing application stack and migrating it to the cloud.
- Re-Architect: Aging applications are broken down into components, converting each function into a microservice with containers. These micro-services communicate via REST APIs but are independent of each other. It induces agility in development, faster time-to-market and increases overall resilience. Micro-services architecture gives way to scalability, pay-as-you-go subscription and remote accessibility.
- Re-Build: Scrapping old legacy applications and creating one from scratch. Old codes are replaceable by shorter lines of codes for maximum productivity and output. Digital transformations or application modernization accelerate innovation, increase efficiency, fasten time to market and reduces overall operational costs.
Requirement: Key Technologies for Application Modernization
Cardinal requirements of application modernization combine a broad portfolio of technologies including private-hybrid-multi-cloud strategies, containers and Kubernetes.
Strategy: Steps to Implement Application Modernization Strategy
Modernization strategy includes the transformation process – technology changes, adding some knowledge, requirement evolution, estimating resources etc. Organizations embrace cardinal components of IT modernization like cloud computing, shared services, agile development and data center consolidation.
To go about, we need to follow a series of steps:
Step 1: Evaluate legacy systems for any issues, concerns, impediments occurring consequent to changes in technology, functionality or architecture.
Step 2: Evaluate modernization options by the ease of implementation, the level of risk and the impact. It involves leveraging the application features by encapsulating its data and functions, making them available as services via an API.
Step 3: Re-hosting, redeploying, re-platforming, refactoring, re-architecting, re-building, re-writing the application component to other infrastructure (physical, virtual or cloud) without modifying any features, functions or code. Often eliminating former application components and re-writing the application components from scratch preserves the application scope and specifications. Replacing it with newer components needs scaling the application scope.
Step 4: Selecting modernization scope with the highest effect and value to the organization by mapping the seven modernization options affecting architecture, technology, cost, functionality and risk.
Step 5: Modernizing legacy applications means selecting between rebuilding, replacing and re-architecture. Later comes with medium risks. The cost to rebuild and replace is high.
It is essential to weigh all options to help identify the extent to which each will have the desired effect with minimum effort and maximize positive impact.
Advantages of Application Modernization
- Refurbishing an application brings in a host of benefits like a reduced cost of infrastructure.
- Cloud offers a pay-per-use model which allows enterprises to scale to manage increased workload with a considerably lower cost of ownership.
- The use of containerization and micro-services makes functional fixtures easier to update.
- Refurnishing old software saves them from instances of cyber-attacks. Migrating to the cloud follows automatic security patch updates.
- Application modernization gives an agile framework to the organization to reduce time and cost of resources and increases efficiency. It makes developers spend more time building productive applications and enhances the organization’s overall productivity.
Challenges Affecting Application Modernization
- Organizations often face capital constraints in implementing incremental steps, especially when your legacy software is more than a decade old. They need to realign their legacy applications with new business requirements.
- If we aim to achieve a complete digital-native enterprise, we should create a business value from ageing legacy applications without re-investing; We require going through business-critical applications that run 24*7/year and converting them into micro-services, one at a time.
- Strong executive-level sponsorship backs the need for IT modernization. The absence of which is might make organizations fall back from their digital transformation journey. The miscommunications between teams, running legacy architecture on the cloud, running modern applications on physical servers make the entire process redundant and inconclusive. It deems as an experimental failure.
- Organizational Change Management is a challenge when legacy systems work on outdated platforms. It often becomes difficult to migrate the data to a more recent platform.
- Co-Existence of Legacy and New Systems becomes difficult and daunting when there is a clash between new and older platforms.
- Significant Modernization Costs and Duration often become an expensive exercise. Organizations require making investments and a considerable amount of time to manage a critical legacy system.
- Migrating an application from on-premise to cloud without considering ROI requires re-platforming and re-architecture. But it heavily depends upon existing systems and infrastructure.
Conclusive: Why does modernizing legacy platforms drive legendary results?
An organization requires bringing down its strategy and pick application modernization projects considering the benefits of cloud, speed, performance, scale and development of new features for its success. It makes way for an improved customer experience and an improved ROI.
Adding in more tools and systems, support technology investments, monitoring activities to meet the standards, making its personnel and processes more effective, using shared services that reduce costs and maximize buying power, standardize systems-operations-security.
It is crucial to evaluate and implement innovative technology for businesses that handle critical data and workloads. It has implications – cost reduction, attracting top talent and productivity gains. Reach out to us for a one-on-one on application modernization services.