Digital transformation has made it imperative for Technology leaders to find effective ways to optimize the underlying infrastructure of the business. And this doesn’t just comprise embracing new systems but also modernizing the slew of feature-rich legacy systems that have been powering the business since inception. Since some legacy systems are extremely critical to the proper functioning of the business, modernizing them in a way that enables maximum efficiency is important, but so is knowing the risk-to-reward proportion before acting.
Your Legacy Application Modernization Options
Legacy systems, although indispensable for many businesses, are also a primary reason holding them back. Not only are they difficult to manage and maintain, they also lead to several security and compliance issues, negatively impact organizational agility and efficiency, and may lead to lost business opportunities. Most of these issues and impediments result from the technology, architecture, or functionality of legacy applications that, unfortunately, are no longer fit for business, nor do they add any business value.
Legacy applications that do not meet requirements imposed by the modern digital environment need to be modernized, so they can fit the modern IT landscape, provide greater business value, and keep up with the demands of the digital world – without being a cost or risk liability. At the same time, apps that become too costly to maintain, fail to scale or are just too complex to manage need to be immediately upgraded – both from a business and IT perspective. If not modernized in time, they can cause several integration hassles, lead to poor visibility, and restrict enterprise innovation.
Therefore, before a tipping point is reached, it is important for technology leaders to look at the different ways in which they can modernize their legacy applications and deal with obstacles in time – for sustained, long-term benefits and results. Let’s look at the top 3 legacy application modernization options you should consider to rehost, replatform, or restructure your apps:
1. Containerization
Modernizing legacy software applications via containerization offer several benefits when compared to traditional approaches. Instead of developers writing, coding, building, and running code in a single environment, containerization helps in seamlessly creating new cloud-native applications that are scalable and agile – across different environments. Modern tools provide a standardized way of packaging applications, allowing teams to address common modernization concerns while driving faster delivery, agility, and portability of applications.
2. Serverless Computing
If you want to accelerate your legacy application modernization efforts, serverless computing can help restructure and optimize existing legacy code while reducing costs and improving IT management. Modern serverless compute services allow you to execute code without having to manage servers and facilitate the modernization of applications via well-planned code execution. Since teams are freed from the administrative tasks of managing complex servers, they can focus on essential business processes and make the most of upscaling flexibility that serverless architectures provide.
3. Cloud Hydration
Cloud hydration is another popular and efficient way of modernizing your legacy applications by rehosting or replatforming them – with minimal changes to application architecture. Instead of simply lifting and shifting legacy apps to the cloud, cloud hydration makes use of modern tools and approaches to efficiently move legacy apps to the cloud, across different use cases and with little or no downtime. These tools allow data from legacy applications to be migrated to a new runtime platform, move the app to the cloud by making minimal code changes, and then copy the data to the cloud infrastructure. Such mirroring of legacy data restricts massive changes to the code structure to be made while also ensuring that when the app is migrated, it seamlessly fails over to the cloud.
Boost Your Legacy Application Modernization Strategy
The global application modernization services market size is expected to grow to $24.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 16.8%. This growth is primarily powered by the growth of cloud services, the pressure of digital transformation, and the rise in demand for modern infrastructure to ensure business continuity.
Modernizing your legacy applications in a way that will have the highest impact and delivers the most value to your organization is extremely critical. But before you do this, it is vital you weigh the different legacy application modernization options, map their impact on your underlying technology architecture and functionality and assess associated costs and risks.
Having a modernization partner by your side can help support your legacy app rehosting, replatforming, or restructuring requirements and enable the best results. By helping you choose the best approach from containerization, serverless computing, and cloud hydration, a partner can unlock the right business opportunities and drive enhanced app performance and reliability – with minimum effort and maximum impact.
