7 Key Benefits Of App Modernization: Transform Legacy Applications

7 Key Benefits Of App Modernization
December 9, 2021

Written by – Manish Juneja

Today, the current state of IT is constantly evolving beyond our imagination. Operational modernization, cloud transformation, and DevOps have become talking points today. Yet, most IT organizations cannot meet user expectations in the modern digital era because their legacy infrastructure cannot cope with this evolving digital revolution.

The old-age technologies have become a roadblock in their path of digital transformation. Nearly 80% of IT leaders believe that not modernizing their legacy infrastructure can negatively impact their organization’s long-term growth. It is also true that most leaders and C-level executives lack information about application modernization and its subsequent benefits.

Hence, with an intent to help them all, here we are presenting this blog that discusses:

  1. What is application modernization?
  2. Why should you modernize your business application?
  3. Top benefits of app modernization
  4. What are the key technologies used in app modernization?
  5. Role of DevOps in application modernization, and
  6. How Rapyder help you in app modernization?

What is application modernization?

Application modernization is repurposing old legacy applications with entirely new features, internal architecture, and infrastructure platforms. It can also be understood as upgrading and updating the legacy applications with the latest features, which no longer function properly and have become incapable of meeting your business needs.

Why should you modernize your business application?

Running outdated applications or legacy systems can be problematic and challenging, especially when they cannot align with modern business requirements. However, considering the pace at which the IT arena is evolving each day with the latest tools and technologies, it is inevitable for every company to go for operational modernization to meet their business challenges.

A study reveals that maintaining the old legacy system can be very time-consuming and makes up 60%-80% of the IT budget in the average corporation. In such scenarios, modernizing legacy systems is the right solution.

Some common challenges faced by legacy apps are listed below:

  1. Some legacy apps no longer receive any support and maintenance from their developers’ team.
  2. Legacy apps neither integrate well with new technology nor are they seldom compatible with modern solutions.
  3. Some legacy apps are monolithic; hence, updating or scaling them up is difficult.
  4. Many legacy apps contain known or unknown security vulnerabilities.
  5. Maintaining legacy apps is time-consuming and not cost-effective.

Do You Know? Around 88% of IT leaders agree that modernized IT systems must meet emerging digital business demands.

Top 7 benefits of app modernization

Some of the top benefits of app modernization are as follows:

1. Reduced costs:

Since outdated apps require vast amounts of money for maintenance, they are not economically viable for organizations. In addition, most of these apps are hosted on on-premises data centers, which are expensive to maintain. Thus, organizations do not get a chance to reap the benefits of the public cloud.

Moreover, hiring specialists for maintaining legacy apps can also prove extremely expensive because we don’t find specialists familiar with aged tools and outdated technologies. Hence by modernizing their applications, organizations achieve 30-50% lower application maintenance and running costs.

2. Enriches customer experience:

A company’s success is determined by how well they provide customer service. If they fail to deliver a best-in-class customer experience, their business or brand will not stand out in a competitive marketplace. In addition, it is quite painful to have older versions of applications if you are trying to enrich your customer experience. In contrast, once you modernize your existing applications, you can use the public cloud environment and provide premium customer service.

3. Enhances productivity:

Often legacy apps are incompatible with modern systems and hardware, causing productivity issues. Hence while using such applications, employees might struggle with lags, bugs, and other errors without reliable help from the application developer.

In contrast, a modernized system can facilitate better communication between teams since modern software facilitates communication between teams. Thus, it would help an organization to enhance its productivity.

4. Improved security:

Due to their age and by using deprecated technology, legacy applications might contain unidentified or known security vulnerabilities. Due to the lack of modern security practices, developing these applications allows attackers to exploit these flaws to breach an organization\’s network.

On the other hand, modernized applications continuously receive security upgrades and bug fixes against new threats. Therefore, companies must use such applications to ensure the safety of their data.

5. Generate better revenue:

Modernizing applications helps businesses to boost their revenue streams. To grow their business, companies can add new services or processes that will improve the customer experience. But legacy apps cannot offer the same flexibility as modern applications; therefore, it isn’t easy to make profitable changes.

In contrast, a modern application enables you to add new features, services, and functions that improve customer experience and more revenue. A happy customer is more likely to promote your business resulting in more revenue.

Do You Know? Around 65% of businesses believe that legacy systems are incapable of addressing the emerging requirements of the digital business.  

6. Build Cloud-native apps:

Once organizations modernize their old-age applications with new features and functions, they can easily rearchitect their legacy applications to cloud-native applications. It empowers them to leverage public cloud benefits such as faster go-to-market, agility, scalability, secured data, and many more.

7. Stay relevant with new technologies:

With application modernization, organizations use today’s digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, and the public cloud. It allows organizations to adapt their IT ecosystem to current trends and develop a flexible platform for future innovation.

What are key technologies used in app modernization?

Now that you understand the top benefits of app modernization, let us further know about the key technologies involved in this process.

Some of the most prominent technologies used in modernizing applications are:

  1. Cloud migration: Cloud migration is the fundamental technology used in app modernization. Companies can scale apps using public, private, and hybrid cloud services efficiently and at a lower cost than on traditional IT infrastructure.
  2.  Containers: Applications are packaged, deployed, and operated using containers in a cloud-centric way. Containerization makes it possible to package an app consistently and lightweight to run across workstations, cloud, or on-premises environments steadily.
  3.  Kubernetes: It is an open-source container orchestration platform used to automate deployment, manage, and scale-up applications.

Role of DevOps in application modernization

DevOps is a widely used practice by most organizations in modernizing applications. DevOps helps increase collaboration between different teams, resulting in increased delivery speed, reliability, faster go-to-market, and stability in production.

Some of the standard practices followed in DevOps are as follows:

  1. Develop smaller, independently deployable microservices from monolithic services
  2. Improves performance and availability by choosing the right cloud technology
  3. It ensures improvement with early feedback, monitoring, and analysis
  4. It implements automation practices such as continuous integration, testing, and deployment.

How Rapyder helps you in app modernization

Infrastructure migration using cloud solutions remains one of the critical pillars of the application modernization process. This strategy does not require adding new hardware, modifying the existing operations, or completely rewriting the existing codes. Hence, it is considered the easiest way to upgrade an organization\’s legacy system, ensuring that they meet your business requirement efficiently.

Rapyder, a born-in cloud consulting company, works with a clear vision to help enterprises achieve their business goals, leveraging more suitable and latest technologies. Rapyder team comprising experts, helps organizations smoothly and efficiently migrate to the public cloud, transforming their legacy infrastructure to be more reliable to remain at the forefront of the competition in the marketplace.

Conclusion

Application modernization plays a vital role in accelerating the digital transformation journeys of an enterprise. Hence, we presented this blog discussing what it means, its benefits, and key technologies used in this process. I hope you found some valuable information reading this blog. At this point, we request you share this blog among social media circles and help others to understand this subject.

Happy Reading!!

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