Legacy application modernization gives new business value to existing outdated applications. These apps may function properly but fail to suit the growing needs of your company. By adding modern features and capabilities, the app developer can improve the function of your app without formidable investments in new custom software.
Keeping legacy applications running in line with the new requirements, technologies, and compliance issues can be time-consuming and costly. If your software isn’t compatible with modern systems, the struggle becomes even more intense. Thus, your company may be losing time and money while revenue and staff satisfaction rates decline.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is adjusting the existing application to fit the new requirements of your company. An outdated, aging application may not be suitable to fulfill the growing needs of your business as technologies change.
Legacy application modernization is a more complex process than updating or upgrading an existing app. However, it’s less time-consuming and financially taxing than creating a new app from scratch.
Who Needs Legacy Application Modernization Services?
How do you know if your company needs application modernization services? You need to evaluate what your current apps do and how well they help your company function. The most common reasons business owners consider application modernization software involve old applications, aging infrastructure, and lack of agility.
1. Legacy Applications
If your company continues using outdated systems, regardless of their age and quality, it’s enduring substantial hidden costs. Legacy applications have efficiency, cybersecurity, and mission risk issues.
- Maintenance and support – legacy systems are usually large in terms of codebase and functionality. Simply changing or replacing one system module is impossible. Any change or upgrade for the system involves substantial efforts.
- Integration and compliance – modern apps are integration-ready by default. To make legacy apps compatible with third-party tools, a big amount of custom code is required. The risk of the final integration going awry with outdated apps is high. In the heavily regulated sectors, compliance requirements may change often. With the lack of flexibility, maintaining the compliance of legacy apps can be costly and, often, impossible.
- Security – with the cybercrime numbers growing every year, legacy systems are taking a big hit. Since they lack modern security technologies and are hard to upgrade, these apps are at a high risk of falling victims to cybercrime. Keeping them secure requires a substantial effort.
Legacy applications are rarely fit to suit the numerous needs of many companies. Employees tend to struggle with using several apps at the same time, thus reducing productivity and increasing the chance of error.
2. Aging Infrastructure
Your company’s infrastructure can be diverse. Some processes can be running on mainframes, custom-made apps, off-the-shelf programs, and many more. Applications hosted on clouds could add to the diversity, making it hard for your company to scale or grow.
Application modernization can help reduce the variety of infrastructure by combining different sources and making it easier for your employees to operate.
3. Poor Agility
Legacy applications mixed with an aging infrastructure lead to poor agility. Legacy apps force employees to spend too much time on administrative tasks like copying data from one app to another. Highly qualified staff is focused on doing repetitive tasks, thus decreasing the efficiency of your company’s work.
Poor agility leaves a little wiggle room for innovation. The more employees struggle with the legacy apps and aging infrastructure, the further they are sucked into a routine while draining your company’s resources. Instead of adopting new technologies, your company is stuck coping with legacy apps, thus losing growth opportunities and yielding to the competition.
By taking advantage of legacy application modernization service, business owners don’t just increase revenues, they improve the company’s agility, stability, and potential.
What is the Process of Application Modernization?
How long does application modernization take? It depends on the scope of work. The developer needs to figure out how much code is needed and how many resources will be used simultaneously.
- Evaluation – the company evaluates the legacy environment from the technical and organizational perspective. It’s important to learn which parts of the program may need to be used in the future as well as which parts are obsolete.
- Planning – the developer evaluates project goals and resource requirements. The plan includes milestones for application source code and data conversion.
- Transformation – during this stage, the rewriting and restructuring take place. Then the data and utility mitigation is achieved. Operations and administrative training should also be performed during transformation.
- Implementation – during this stage, the developer verifies the application’s functionality, scalability, and reliability.
Different approaches to application modernization exist. Some of them are:
- Rehosting – creating a new modern interface for legacy application by taking all information from the old software and redeploying it to modern infrastructure. This approach is quick, however, it doesn’t modernize the app itself. Accordingly, you still have all the maintenance costs and security risks.
- Code Converting – converting apps written in the old programming language to a new programming language. Even though this approach modernizes the app, it doesn’t change its structure.
- Replacing – remove old apps and replace them with new ones built from scratch. Usually, it’s the best approach to improving your company’s function. However, it comes at a higher cost than others.
- Replatforming – migrating the app to a new platform by making minimal changes to the code to make adaptation smooth.
- Rearchitecturing – altering the application code so it can be shifted to a new app architecture.
- Rebuilding – rebuilding or rewriting the app component from scratch while preserving the specs and scope.
Why Choose Our Legacy Application Modernization Services?
Entrance Consulting is a custom app development company that has extensive experience with all types of app modernization techniques. We develop a personalized approach to each client to ensure the success of application modernization while minimizing downtime.
As a top-notch application modernization consultant, we can evaluate the needs of your company to ensure a smooth modernization process and the highest ROI.
