Application modernization has become a hot topic in recent years as organizations strive to improve their systems and stay ahead of the competition. From improved user experience to reduced costs and increased efficiency, there are many reasons companies consider modernizing their legacy systems.
So, should you consider this investment? Let’s find out!
What Is Application Modernization?
Application modernization updates legacy systems to align with current market trends and technologies. This involves upgrading or replacing the underlying infrastructure, architecture, and technology stack to improve efficiency, security, and user experience. The aim is to improve performance, functionality, and overall user experience while reducing maintenance costs. Application modernization helps organizations remain competitive by keeping their applications current and relevant. This can be done through various methods, such as re-architecting, re-platforming, or refactoring, to enhance architecture, migrate to a new platform, or modify the code base. The primary goal is to provide organizations with an efficient, secure, and user-friendly application that supports their business objectives.
The Need for Application Modernization
If an outdated or legacy system is not aligned with the company’s objectives, it can pose several difficulties. It may lack security patch updates, making it vulnerable to viruses and bugs that can disrupt its functionality. Additionally, these systems may present security risks as they are no longer supported by the vendor or company. Maintaining such systems can also be costly for businesses.
Benefits of Application Modernization
Boosts Productivity
Training software developers and teams to use legacy systems can be costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, some outdated applications are not capable of automating repetitive tasks or integrating new processes, leading to decreased productivity among engineering teams.
Modernizing applications integrate different aspects of the development process into a unified ecosystem, enabling employees to work on multiple tasks at once and reducing the time it takes to bring products to market. Additionally, modernized applications come equipped with advanced features and tools that simplify operations and don’t require extensive training, leading to increased employee productivity.
Reduces Operational Costs and Tech Debt
The maintenance requirements of legacy applications make them an uneconomical solution for organizations. Furthermore, these applications are typically hosted in on-premise data centers that are expensive to maintain and often lack adequate documentation, making it challenging to implement new features. As a result, these applications accrue a high amount of technical debt.
In contrast, modernizing an enterprise’s technology infrastructure enables the organization to leverage the capabilities of the private cloud to meet emerging digital business requirements. This eliminates the need for a separate data center, as cloud databases offer a cost-effective pay-as-you-go model where you only pay for the services you use.
The implementation of DevOps practices can significantly improve operations and reduce costs through the optimization of CI/CD pipelines, more efficient release cycles, and continuous improvement across all development processes.
Improves Business Agility
Traditionally, developers were required to create monolithic environments to make any modifications or updates to the code, server, and configurations. However, with the advent of application modernization, it is no longer necessary to shut down servers or plan extensive release updates, as the application is divided into multiple individually managed workloads.
An example of the benefits of app modernization can be seen in the rapid growth of Pinterest. The company successfully increased its user base from 50,000 to 17 million in just nine months by scaling its processing and storage activities on Amazon Web Services.
Enhances Scalability
In a rapidly changing technological landscape, it is imperative for businesses to continually upgrade to remain competitive and successful. To thrive and expand physically and technologically, it is necessary for organizations to adapt and evolve.
However, legacy systems often make it difficult to introduce new features or functionality, which can hinder a business’s growth and competitiveness. This is why organizations require storage solutions that can accommodate changing requirements and enable them to scale as needed. With the scalability offered by cloud technology, businesses can dynamically add or reduce IT resources to accommodate changing workloads.
Keeps Up With Latest Trends
Modernization of legacy systems allows companies to integrate the latest technologies and features into their older systems, seamlessly merging necessary components. This also enables organizations to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies such as big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing.
In the realm of customer service, modernization enables the use of AI and machine learning through predictive analytics, including natural language processing for chatbots and voice and text analysis. This is particularly beneficial in an era where personalization is a key differentiator for businesses.
Provides Better Support and Maintenance
Legacy applications can become costly to maintain over time due to bugs and outdated code. Modernization offers a solution by migrating legacy logic and code to a new platform and aligning the application infrastructure with the latest technologies and trends. This enables easier source code changes, database migrations, and documentation writing, as well as leveraging containerization and orchestration to set the desired state for modern applications. The re-engineering approach employed in modernization includes data and coding restrictions to ensure system security and prevent vulnerabilities. As a result, modernization enables companies to update their legacy systems with the latest technology stack, aligned with their business goals, for easier support and maintenance.
Improves User Experience
Legacy modernization prioritizes user experience (UX) to meet the demands for flexible and engaging digital experiences in web and mobile applications. The process involves the redesign of the user-facing components to improve information access and the overall UX. This redesign incorporates visual elements such as icons, font style, size, and others to create a distinct and visually appealing interface, intending to enhance perception, understanding, navigation, and interaction with the system or application.
Conclusion
Modernizing applications can bring many benefits, including improved user experience, enhanced security, cost savings, and improved integration. Businesses should consider this investment to keep up with the competition and meet changing customer needs. To achieve the best results, it’s essential to work with a trustworthy provider with experience in the application modernization process.
