Legacy Application Modernization: An Ultimate Guide to Future-Proof Your Business Legacy Systems

You have spent immense time, money, and effort to build your legacy systems. It's natural for you to have apprehensions as a business to introduce any transformation in your legacy applications. But you need to understand that your legacy system may have reached a maturity point, facing challenges like:

• Inadequate security
• Slow and inefficient performance
• Inability to support growing business needs
• Unable to support latest technology integrations
• Lack of support for maintenance

If these are the challenges you are facing with your legacy systems, then you should consider application modernization. Why? Because modernizing legacy applications will help optimize the monolithic architecture of old applications with modern cloud-based solutions that brings scalability, agility, performance, speed, security, and efficiency.

This blog aims to guide you on ways legacy application modernization services can help you refine your old and outdated technology with modern solutions that are adaptive to your changing needs. In the next 12-15 minutes, you will gain insights on aspects like:

1. What is legacy application modernization? [with examples]
2. When is the right time for modernizing legacy applications and what to expect from it?
3. How to modernize legacy applications? [Learn about the 7 R’s Approach]

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started.

What is Legacy Application Modernization? [+ 2 Examples]

Legacy application modernization is a dynamic process of rehosting, replatforming, or refactoring outdated business technology for modern environments.

Modernizing legacy applications help businesses update and optimize outdated technology systems to achieve agility, boost operational efficiency, address limitations with technology scalability, and attain optimal security.

With the modernization of legacy applications, your business can create new value from aging applications by optimizing them using modern capabilities and features. This is a smart approach to make older legacy technology systems compatible to newer modern solutions.

Examples of Popular Legacy Technologies Leveraging Modernization with Low-Code Development Approach

1. SAP

Businesses running SAP has customized the core application to meet the unique needs of the company. But these customizations are expensive and hard to upgrade for the future requirements. Thus, legacy application modernization comes to rescue. Modernization of SAP legacy technology with low-code development approach helps to unlock new value by upgrading and modifying the system with modern capabilities to achieve or maintain competitive edge.

2. .NET and Oracle

Enterprise systems are often built using technologies like .NET and Oracle as they offer advantage over COTS solutions by delivering the exact features required. However, it becomes very complex and cumbersome to upgrade these legacy systems later with new features and capabilities. Legacy application modernization has been a proven solution to this complexity. Many organizations have updated and optimized the .NET and Oracle built legacy technology with low-code development approach. This helped businesses to retain the original technology while upgrading it with modern capabilities.

With the above definition, explanation, and examples, you have gained a basic understanding of legacy application modernization. Now, let’s explore the right time to opt for such digital transformation of your legacy systems.

When is the Right Time for Modernizing Legacy Applications?

There’s no definite answer to this question, neither can you just jump on the bandwagon! It takes meticulous planning to outdo a dated system and bring forth a new one with a modern technology integration. By following a step-by-step approach to legacy application modernization, enterprises stand to gain optimal value from the process.

However, in order to answer the question of “when”, below are a list of signs mentioned that indicates your business need legacy application modernization. Therefore, it the right time for modernizing legacy applications when:

• Your legacy system fails to cater to the changing needs of the company and doesn’t support business growth owing to scalability constraints
• Your legacy system becomes slow owing to extensively patched architecture and hard coded passwords
• Your legacy system result in increased technical debt hindering business scalability and growth
• Your legacy system becomes vulnerable to security risks due to obsolete hardware or software that results in no maintenance support

If you encounter any of these signs in your legacy technology, its time you consider business application modernization.

Where legacy systems are the good, old comfort zones, migration to a modern system might seem de-settling at first. However, if your legacy technology is showing the risk signs mentioned above, it is the right time for you to seek legacy application modernization services.

But, what to expect from modernization of legacy systems? This is the most vital question that you as a business should comprehend before adapting any sort of digital transformation technique. Explore the list of expected outcomes of the modernization process against the possible constraints of legacy systems.

What to Expect from Legacy Modernization?

Legacy modernization is an approach that enables you to revitalize and transform your existing business technology for current and future needs.

Legacy system modernization or mainframe modernization is a critical business decision. However, it is a crucial aspect of business transformation too and digital transformation drives like these, help you achieve your business goals way more smoothly.

Thus, it is important to know the all-round offerings of the process to understand the benefits your business can attain with legacy application modernization strategies. Below are a few outcomes you can expect from business application modernization initiative.

1. A modernized process helps your business become more adaptable to future market (driving polished end-user experience) and technological disruptions.
2. Mainframe modernization provides a more compatible environment to enable greater feature integration plans.
3. Incorporating the business application modernization approach boosts security and reliability.
4. Enabling modern capabilities in older technology systems helps secure business logic intended to drive high performance while accelerating the time to market.
5. The modernization approach helps attain operational efficiencies and aids integration of navigation tools and online help plugins.
6. Legacy modernization enables more scalability and agility in app development environments.
7. With modernization, your business enables latest tech designs and tweaks for a flexible IT foundation.
8. Legacy application modernization also helps increase ROI indirectly.

Now that we have discussed the offerings of legacy application modernization, let’s get to the crux of the process with a comprehensive list of approaches towards the modernization approach.

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How to Modernize Legacy Applications? [The 7 R’s of Legacy Application Modernization Process]

Modernization of legacy applications itself is a complex business process and the seven approaches each come with their own levels of difficulties and rewards. The trick is to choose the right option which can make your systems fast and cost-effective. Here’s a list of the 7 R’s modernization techniques or approaches.

1. Rebuild

Rebuilding legacy systems is perhaps the most expensive and has the longest procedure but delivers the most optimum results. While the other R of methods serve as steps to achieve complete modernization for most organizations, the rebuild method transforms legacy processes into fully integrated cloud-native environments.

The rebuild method includes extensive DevOps along with technologies like APIs, microservices, containers etc.

2. Rehost

In the rehosting methodology, the legacy systems are deployed in a new environment instead of altering their code, modifying functionalities, etc. Organizations can actually retain their investments in legacy processes and at the same time leverage the benefits of the cloud infrastructure by rehosting. Also called the ‘lift and shift’ approach, rehosting enables one to be on cloud without having to re-engineer systems.

Although, through this approach of modernization, all cloud-native tools cannot be leveraged to their exact benefits.

3. Refactor

Refactoring is generally used in case of hybrid environments where parts of the legacy systems are code optimized for improving performance. Refactoring is generally carried out by keeping the frontend or the functionalities unaltered and changing the components of the backend.

Many organizations opt for refactoring because the process is less disruptive than a complete rewrite. Refactoring is mostly preferred because organizations get due time to assess each component of the app and deem the best-fit platform.

4. Replace

This approach involves scraping the existing system entirely and bringing into force an entirely new system for optimizing business processes. The risk of the process is to determine the integration of existing data in the new system to prevent any sort of disruption.

5. Retain

This is one rare scenario when an enterprise decides to make no changes to its environment and lets its solutions function as it is. For an IT leader, the decision to retain a legacy system is more critical than modernizing it. In this regard, organizations must have a long-term strategy that ensures smooth functioning of all app components.

6. Replatform

Just like the name suggests, the process is moving an existing legacy system entirely to a different platform. While the features of the apps remain same, re-platforming ports the app components to a new platform with minimal changes to the coding.

To the organization’s advantage, improved performance can be leveraged with minimal infrastructural costs.

7. Retire

This refers to totally discarding the existing system and moving the users to an alternate system that are already up and running. Retiring legacy systems often call for a complete process redesign to bridge all kinds of gaps in the operational process.

CTOs and IT leaders need to carefully assess the pros and cons of every tech related decision. What may have worked for a peer, may instead cause a rebound effect on your business. It is, thus, crucial to assess your needs against the benefits and then determine the type of legacy application modernization approach your business should adapt.

Did You Know Automation Can Be Infused to Modernize Legacy Systems?

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Planning to Consider Legacy Application Modernization?

With the above blog, we have tried to provide you a holistic overview of legacy application modernization and the ways your business can leverage it. Yes, legacy system modernization is a time-consuming and expensive procedure with certain associated software modernization traps. However, if you adapt well-evaluated legacy modernization techniques, those risks can be easily avoided. To help you with more clarity, we have created a checklist that can aid to avoid the modernization risks.

Avoid the risks of business application modernization by using the below checklist from our team:

• Identify the current limitations in your existing legacy applications or systems and define the exact requirement against each constraint
• Evaluate the benefits of modernization of legacy applications and mark your expectations from the approach
• Set clear goals and choose an approach or strategy that best fit your end output expectation
• Select the tech stack for achieving the desired performance and user experience
• Seek legacy application modernization services from leading providers like us

If you are still unsure or doubtful, find a business application modernization company for consultation. As a prominent application modernization company, Radixweb has a reputation of assisting organizations (startups to Fortune 500 companies) with the right guidance for selecting proper legacy application modernization roadmap. If you want a direction with your existing legacy technology, you can seek support from our team.

Final ThoughtsLegacy application modernization doesn’t mean a total overhaul, oftentimes it can mean even minute alterations to existing systems or no changes at all. It all depends on how your existing system is functioning at the moment and whether it is in line with your long-term business goals. Not all disruptions are disruptive, especially when working with an experienced application development company.