Application modernization with cloud migration is the major focus for your company if you are using software for your critical business operations that are written many years ago. In this article we provide introduction to what is application modernization.
You are reading an article which is part of the blog series on Legacy Application Modernization:
- Part 1 - What is application modernization
- Part-2: The Top 5 reasons why you should consiler application modernization
- Part 3 - 5 Key challenges when modernize your legacy business app
- Part 4 - 4 Steps to Preparing for the legacy software application modernization
What is software or application modernization?
Application modernization is a practice in software engineering to upgrade existing software for newer computing and business approaches.
Here is what Wikipedia says about this topic:
Legacy modernization, also known as software modernization or platform modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to modern computer programming languages, architectures (e.g. microservices), software libraries, protocols or hardware platforms. Legacy transformation aims to retain and extend the value of the legacy investment through migration to new platforms to benefit from the advantage of the new technologies.
The existing software that you might be using for years now is called a legacy software. It is quite common in the business world to think about re-creating such business application for better ROI, productivity, implement automation or any other good reason to run your business better. This process is called Legacy Application Modernization.
Even if it's serving purpose of your business needs you should consider application modernization as it will give you change to optimize the software and processes, make it more secure, reliable and give better performance. Software modernization will also create opportunity to automate certain part of the process, and make it easy to integrate with external softwares.
More than 70% of companies have now migrated at least some workloads into the public cloud, according to Gartner research. It will not be a good idea to leverage cloud and move your legacy application to cloud as it is not built with such and approach. Legacy application written in the old technologies might not support many features due to this.
Application modernization approaches
software or application modernization is generally a large, multi-year project and requires strategic approach in architecting, developing, deploying and switch over process. That is why it is good idea with split the application into multiple smaller applications and use modern, cloud-native, and agile approach with CI/CD to incrementally switching over to modern applications until the full system is modernized. A migration strategy must ensure that the system remains fully functional during the modernization effort.
There are different drivers and strategies for software modernization:
- Technology driven modernization is an initiative to upgrade the code of legacy system to latest technology with or without cloud-native capabilities as per the needs of the busienss.
- Business Focused modernization is tied to the business value added by the modernization. This approach requires analysis of existing software features against the priority, health, risk, complexity, and cost in order to decide the approach of software modernization.
Conclusion
Infrastructure and Operations leaders are considering Application modernization and cloud migration on top priority and 70% businesses will be running their softwares on cloud by 2024 accounting to Gartner.
In this article we covered the brief idea of what is application modernization and some basic approaches to handle the same. Subscribe to our blog and keep an eye on Application Modernization tag to know more as we will be adding more content in the upcoming months.
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