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Does your business application portfolio rely on traditional monolithic architectures?
Is your enterprise struggling to manage technology maintenance costs?
If yes, it's time you need to evolve to become ‘adaptive’ and ‘agile’ to cater to the dynamic needs of the business, market, and customers. Being in the enterprise business needs you to become ‘adaptive’ than ‘reactive’. Cut through the noise in the technology market and overcome the barriers of digital transformation using microservices architecture in the cloud and improve CI/CD.
With new disruptive technologies emerging daily, the future of an enterprise relies on being more adaptive to change in order to cater to evolving needs in real-time.
That being said, let’s learn about what is application modernization and its use cases.
Application modernization is the process of enabling businesses to refine their existing technologies for aligning with contemporary IT infrastructure needs. It is an essential step for businesses towards digital transformation, and is a #2 top priority of CIOs as stated by NASCIO (National Association of State Chief Information Officers) survey report.
The process of technology modernization has evolved in the market as a solution to complete replacement of old and obsolete business systems. Modernization of old business systems with new technology capabilities allows you to embrace cloud infrastructures and rapidly adapt to evolving needs. It is a strategic approach to protect your existing tech investments and optimize your future TCO with solutions that address errors and enable tidying up the present computing modules with futuristic app development services.
As per Markets and Markets report, the application modernization market size will witness a growth rate (CAGR) of 16.7% having $15.2 Billion in 2022 to $32.8 Billion by 2027. Therefore, it's high time businesses start to modernize applications to elevate their end user experience and embrace chances of growth and expansion.
Application modernization is a smart and efficient transformative IT strategy adapted by businesses to catch up with the tech trends in the market and accelerate growth. Additionally, it helps organizations to become digitally mature and facilitate disruptions in business operations, mainly in three ways or methods.
Modernization approach works with two primary technology modules – one is cloud and the other is microservices. These two modules bring ‘agility’ and ‘adaptiveness’ to your business technology systems, making your organization change-ready for future trends. However, this is not the end of modernization technology approaches. There are more infrastructural and code level methods used to revitalize the business legacy systems consistently with trending IT capabilities.
Some application modernization examples include:
Modernization brings innovation and agility in varied ways. It’s not a one-time process but works best with continuous approach to transformative IT.
Top enterprises leveraging application modernization for their business technology systems include:
These enterprises use business technology systems working for over a decade that need to catch up with the trending computing modules to meet customer expectations rightfully. Therefore, these above brands continuously upgrade their legacy systems with the modernization approach to improve operational efficiencies while keeping maintenance cost low.
With clarity on app modernization approach, there comes one vital question. How to leverage application modernization? But, before you get answer to this, it is essential to know what are the different types and forms of modernization in practice.
There are different types of application migration and modernization. Each of them is characterized by their technical qualities and use cases.
Transform your mission-critical enterprise monolithic applications or containerized systems with legacy app modernization approach. The rigid computing approaches and IT environment of the existing systems that are running for over 10+ years brings slowness in business operations and creates technological debt that limits growth, scalability, and ultimately ROI.
Leverage enterprise application modernization for business legacy systems including CRM, ERP, HRM, and others. Run your enterprise apps on modern IT environments by implementing cloud, PaaS, and microservices-based solutions.
Modernizing enterprise apps helps quickly respond to the pressing needs of the business and customers, and embrace chances for growth and expansion with minimum technical debt.
Database modernization refers to a process of migrating business critical database structures like MS SQL and Oracle to real-time managed environments of cloud such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. Modernizing database structures help implement robust security to your organization’s information with optimum flexibility, agility, and accessibility. This is an approach that works to enhance collaborative workflow structures with easy access to data from anywhere at any given time.
Maximize the workflow efficiency of your enterprise with greater control and security structures to your critical business information leveraging database modernization.
Cloud modernization is the process of migrating your business technology systems, architectures, and data from on-premise server to a managed cloud server. Migrating to cloud environments including AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure makes your IT ecosystem agile and adaptive to new technology upgrades at minimal risks.
Cloud app modernization or migration processes helps reduce technical debt and maximize the value of your tech investments. You need highly proficient tech specialists to perform cloud modernization (or cloud native application modernization) to ensure your existing business operations don’t suffer any downtime. Explore how Radixweb can help you with cloud migration and modernization solutions.
Leverage cloud modernization to thrive and sustain in the transformative IT environment and move fast with continuous innovation matching the trends in the tech market.
Mainframe modernization refers to a process of optimizing an organization’s mainframe apps in terms of performance, interface, code, and infrastructure. The process involves leveraging managed tools and risk-mitigated methods of optimizing existing mainframe apps complex, inflexible, and monolithic structures with cloud-first solutions. Mainframe application modernization works as a great step towards 360-degree digital transformation. Adapt and innovate fast with AWS mainframe modernization, Azure mainframe modernization, Google cloud mainframe modernization, and more.
Your mainframe applications require continuous upgrades to match the modern technology trends and deliver as per the evolving needs of the business. Thus, overcome the operational challenges caused by laggard mainframe apps with modernization and mainframe cloud migration approach. Evolve and upgrade your mainframe legacy systems rapidly to ‘thrive’ amid competitors and disruptions.
Software Product Modernization
In the world of technology, change is the only constant. Every sort of technologies used across businesses and industries needs to get refined as per the latest trends and needs of the market. And so, software products are no exception.
Software product modernization involves reformulating existing systems by applying modern technologies, methodologies, and advanced models – including Cloud, DevOps, Agile, and Low Code. It's simply is a process of enhancing existing software products to align contemporary computing technologies.
Upgrading and enhancing the software product by implementing modern languages, frameworks, and infrastructure platforms helps extend the lifespan of the application that ultimately helps with greater ROI.
Employing these above legacy app modernization types will help you become a digital vanguard enterprise that can rapidly evolve and be change-ready using strategic technology approaches. Now, get a quick walk-through of the top benefits of application modernization.
The technology landscape is rapidly evolving with disruptions in and out, changing the ways businesses operate. Advanced tech modules such as IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Cloud, and Blockchain took over the market.
There are numerous applications in the market that has these above new digital technologies in it, reshaping the needs of end users. It is vital for the existing IT systems to efficiently interact with these new technologies emerging in the digital ecosystem to rapidly respond to the changing needs of the business and market while keeping the organization’s governance and security in line.
However, mostly these systems (existing + new) do not align to each other, and often creates challenges. Modernization is an approach that helps fill this gap. Here are the top reasons highlighted for a quick look at its top advantages and why adapting this practice is preferred by top tech enterprises.
Application modernization approach helps with:
The unrelenting pace of technology evolution with new and more advanced IT capabilities demands businesses to quickly capitalize on opportunities. Modernization brings that rapidness, agility, and resilience. However, when you consider to modernize legacy applications for your business, the first step for you must involve reflecting back and get answers to few questions as stated below:
Listing down answers to these set of questions will help you justify your investment on modernization and yield the maximum benefit from the approach.
Forward-thinking organizations not just aim to respond to the changes of the market but also work to upgrade their operations in ways that make them future-ready. Enterprise businesses must incorporate mechanisms to scale as per the evolving needs of time.
There are several reasons for your unique business to leverage modernization that goes beyond the ones mentioned above. But, the end goal for every organization remains the same; to create value at lower costs and maximized ROI.
There is enough understanding on ways modernization helps revitalize the existing legacy systems. However, there are many enterprises who are skeptical about leveraging this approach. Let’s find out what critical challenges organizations’ face with application modernization and what stops them from modernizing their business legacy systems.
While modernizing applications works as a great solution to upgrade existing IT systems for enterprise scalability, efficiency, agility, and resilience; the same impose several challenges that work as a roadblock to the adaption of this practice.
Application modernization challenges impose barriers to digital transformation of enterprise IT ecosystem. There are many enterprises who initiated and made efforts to modernize their business legacy systems but fail to achieve positive progress in it. These failed attempts of some enterprises made others highly skeptical on leveraging the application modernization approach for their business.
Here are some of the key application modernization challenges that enterprises struggle to deal with and often are the reasons for the failure in adaption of the process.
Most of the enterprise businesses often struggle to prioritize their technology modernization needs. Deciding on ‘where to start’ and ‘what to modernize first’ becomes hard to identify as the majority of organizations have several outdated systems and legacy apps working as mission-critical for the business. There is a lot of investment, time, and app dependencies involved that makes this step often very critical for enterprises. Owing to lack of clarity, many enterprises backout from leveraging the legacy application modernization process.
Solution: In this scenario, either of the approaches works best for enterprise businesses - modernization for an incremental ROI, modernization for IT sustainability, modernization for dramatic business growth, and modernization for improved customer experience. Choosing the approach that works critical for the enterprise at a given time can help prioritize the technology needs and decide what to modernize.
The second most critical application modernization challenge is its unpreparedness to disruptions. Often, enterprises have great dependencies associated to their business legacy systems that makes it challenging to modernize the IT as such disruptions can cause severe loss. Additionally, there isn’t adequate knowledge, technology understanding, and right skillsets that could help enterprises figure out a reliable solution to business disruption challenges with legacy app modernization. This ultimately creates a roadblock to the adoption of legacy system modernization.
Solution: The zero-disruption legacy app modernization approach often consist of three pillar strategies - micro change process using phased modernization approach (includes adding or replacing functions one at a time and facilitates continuous integration/continuous delivery across the development pipeline), harmonization process using cloud migration (includes linking systems and database from existing on-premise sources to third-party managed servers), and business process management using low-code development (includes working with no code platforms that helps facilitate collaboration between business and IT eliminating friction or disruption much before deployment). Organizations often opt for these three pillar strategies to slowly upgrade their mission-critical legacy systems without causing disruptions.
Another critical application modernization challenge is transforming the monolithic structures for the cloud.
For most businesses, untangling the messy monolithic structures from the IT ecosystems, business processes, and other dependent technologies become so overwhelming that they drop-out their plan to modernize. The core reasons for backing-out are high technical debt and low-level readiness to tackle fallout damages.
The monolithic systems often have dozens of business technologies associated or interwoven which makes it tough to extract and update one critical function without damaging the other. Additionally, there are bare minimum skilled professionals who can perform this task with precision (owing to the tech skill gap). Therefore, modernization becomes a far-reached dream for enterprises with highly tangled monolithic legacy systems.
Solution: Leveraging microservices can work to get these monolithic structures decoded. Implementing microservices as a first step to application modernization will help you build a strong IT portfolio and will make it easier to migrate to cloud without causing business disruption. You just need a proficient technical partner to execute this complex task for you. Hence, the focus should be on finding the right expertise and not dropping the plan to legacy system modernization.
Legacy system modernization process often creates security vulnerabilities that pose as a vital risk for enterprises and restricts them from adapting the method. There are database structures and confidential business information that becomes prone to security threats while migration to cloud and modernization of the system’s functions. Such security and compliance risks to legacy systems can have unbearable impact on business and so it becomes hard for enterprises to opt for the method at the first go.
Solution: A reliable partner is all an enterprise need to overcome this challenge. Collaborate with a brand with vast experience in enterprise modernization as they have strict security measures (such as CISQ) in place to protect IT from threats. They know the tricks to secure your database and code while performing IT upgrades or optimizations.
The last and key challenge to transformational IT strategy for enterprises is that they lack knowledge of application modernization best practices. For IT decision-makers, the road to application modernization is not clearly known and so often it feels risky to practice or implement the unknown, having the cost and business vulnerabilities in place.
Not knowing how to rightfully modernize legacy applications poses uncertainties and an unclear outcome vision, ultimately hindering the modernization of the old business technologies leading to slow and inefficient processes, high TCO, less tech scalability, and ultimately damaged business growth.
Solution: There are different application modernization methods or best practices. Such as Rebuild, Rehost, Refactor, Replace, Replatform, Retain, or Retire. The right approach depends on your technology needs and the priority of those needs. You can refactor the code to improve performance without altering functionality, migrate to cloud through lift and shift approach or hybrid hosting strategy, and can also choose to completely replace the existing legacy system. The app modernization strategy to adopt will be unique to an enterprise’s individual needs. It is recommended to document a mini plan for each practice or method to understand the differences and identify the correct approach for the current needs of the business.
Here's a roadmap to guide you through the enterprise application modernization process:
1. Create a Business Case
Clearly define the ‘why’ behind modernization. What are the expected benefits? Who will it empower? A strong business case lays the foundation for successful application transformation.
2. Embrace Strategic Planning
Before diving in, assess your existing enterprise application. Understand their functionalities and core strengths, set priorities for modernization, and select the most suitable approach.
You can consider the 5R strategy (Re-host, Re-platform, Refactor, Reengineer, Retire/Replace) to make informed decisions.
3. Pick Modernization Approach
There are a range of options to modernize your enterprise applications that you can select as per your modernization needs:
4. Prioritize Security
Security should be an ongoing consideration throughout the entire modernization process. Therefore, implement robust security measures at each stage to safeguard your data and applications.
5. Ensure a Smooth App Transition
For a seamless transition, you can go with an iterative approach to minimize disruption and encourage user buy-in by adopting a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy.
For that, you should develop a core version of the modernized application with essential features, gather user feedback through iterative releases, and continuously refine the application based on their input.
In turn, you can create a final product that aligns with user needs and fosters a smooth transition.
Generally, developing a small-scale or mid-size application costs around $50,000 to $200,000.
However, when it comes to developing an enterprise-grade application, it starts at $100,000 and easily extends as per your business needs. This is because an enterprise application requires intricate features to support critical business operations, robust security measures, and frictionless integration services.
Being in the technology business for over 25+ years, Radixweb has the market experience and technology expertise to bring on solutions with long-term end value. Our application modernization approach aims to not just help businesses 'survive' the dramatically changing technology market but also 'lead' with new breakthrough IT innovations. The Radixweb tech experts aim to make our 'enterprise partners' future-ready to market trends and technology disruptions.
Here are some of the application modernization approaches we practice to optimize business IT for incremental ROI and sustainable growth.
Transforming legacy apps from monolithic modules to microservices is a vital step to modernization. Microservices architecture helps break down the complex monolithic app modules into a collection of smaller independent units that carry out every individual function as a separate service, each having unique code logic and databases.
The microservices transformation helps build a dynamic IT ecosystem that can scale at speed with optimal efficiency levels. It helps eliminate dead codes from your existing systems that in turn removes the associated security risks plus maintenance to these unneeded codes. Additionally, it also helps reformulate the spaghetti code structures that are complex, costly, and time consuming to manage and maintain. This ultimately energizes your IT ecosystem with hygiene practices that significantly minimizes the TCO and enable utilize those resources for innovation and other transformational initiatives.
The Radixweb experts have extensive experience and expertise in transforming monolithic apps to microservices architecture with potential to skyrocket your digital future.
Cloud-native modernization is a process approach used for legacy apps that helps exploit the benefits of cloud computing structures without being tied down to any specific cloud platform. It empowers organizations to run applications in highly dynamic IT environments. As a seasoned application modernization company, of modernization with the use of time-tested techniques and technologies like GitOps, Serverless Computing, PaaS, and DevSecOps.
Radixweb's cloud-native modernization solutions are powered by #1 cloud service providers including AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, and Google. We help scale organizations and their business technologies with high-grade cloud-native application development and modernization solutions for sustainable growth and incremental ROI.
DevOps integration to application modernization enable frequent code deployments, low failure rates, increased time to deployment, and faster time to recovery. It helps intelligently automate repeatable processes in the app modernization process using AI and data science and enable continuous modernization. Building repeatable pipeline for refactoring through automation helps achieve smooth transitions to technology evolutions in the market and changing business needs.
With our DevOps implementation roadmap for application modernization, you can improve the timeliness and accuracy of app delivery modules that ultimately enables accelerate your legacy app modernization journey.
Implementation of agile helps break the work of application modernization into chunks that enable enterprises measure the success of the effort through short trial-and-test practices. This practice gives better ability to identify the success or outcome quality, and accordingly amend to justify investment.
Additionally, app modernization using agile methodology helps integrate flexibility in the development life cycle. It helps minimize risks, optimize costs, and increases the scope to fill gaps without causing downtime or disruptions. Additionally, the use of Agile in application modernization helps perform trial of innovations with real-time user feedback.
As a leading IT modernization software company, we help devise the most appropriate app modernization strategy using the approaches mentioned above that fit your business needs and market trends. We use the latest application modernization tools and technologies that have been tested and proven in 25+ markets. One of our clients, Graham Daugherty, COO of RemedyConnect, greatly benefitted by partnering with us for rebuilding their existing app to support upgraded iOS and Android platforms. Our experts evaluated the needs and scope of the application modernization project and strategically implemented solutions, enabling obtain the desired outcome. We helped modernize the client’s healthcare app with progressive functionalities using sophisticated technologies and smart implementation processes.
The COO of RemedyConnect quoted on our modernization services:
Forward thinking organizations embrace new techniques to refine their existing technologies for better performance, lower costs, and higher scalability. Turn your legacy systems into an asset like RemedyConnect with Radixweb as your partner. Collaborating with Radixweb experts will help you obtain value-led and top-notch quality application modernization solutions strengthening your business to ‘thrive’, ‘evolve’, and ‘lead’ through the changing market conditions.
Derive new value from old business technologies through transformative IT solutions