Constant revolution in technology and the ever-evolving market scenarios have compelled businesses to modernize their legacy systems to stand the test of time. This birthed the concept of application modernization. This enables your apps and system to adapt to modern technologies, such as AI, cloud, and ML, and become more efficient.
However, to make the app modernization process successful, you must follow some proven best practices that can benefit your business.
Moreover, facilitating the app modernization process in-house can be a hefty task since it’s a complex process that demands expert assistance. The ideal solution is to outsource
legacy application modernization services from a professional company. Let’s understand the concept of app modernization below and what practices can accelerate your business growth.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is the process of updating, transforming, and modernizing outdated software applications and infrastructure to a modern environment using the latest technologies such as cloud, microservices, and containerization. It involves revamping legacy systems or applications that might have been developed using outdated technologies, coding practices, and design principles.
The reason why you should invest in application modernization services is because they enhance the applications' performance, functionality, scalability, security, and user experience while also making them more adaptable to changing business requirements.
Application modernization is not a one-size-fits-all process and should be tailored to each organization's goals, constraints, and requirements. It requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing management to achieve the desired outcomes and benefits. Hence, a structured process is followed to ensure the transformation and modernization of applications result in rewarding outcomes.
Application Modernization Process
Application modernization is critical to staying competitive in the market, fulfilling the changing consumer needs, and capitalizing on the shifting technological landscape. But to ensure the successful transitioning of the app to the modern environment, it’s essential to follow a structured process. This process involves assessing, transforming, and modernizing legacy applications for enhanced performance, scalability, security, and user experience. Below, we will discuss four steps involved in the process of modernizing an app.
1. Assessment
The application modernization process begins with thoroughly assessing the compatibility and readiness of the company’s legacy apps. In this step, you need to determine whether an app needs refactoring, rearchitecting, repackaging, or rebuilding the app from scratch.
2. Build
You can implement cloud-native approaches, programming languages, and frameworks based on your business requirements and legacy system assessment. The experienced app modernization company will use modern technologies such as microservices, containerization, and APIs that encourage automation to build a modernized application.
3. Deploy
In this step, use DevOps practices to quickly and reliably deploy the code using automation. The microservices are packaged with a container and orchestrated using an orchestration platform like Kubernetes. This helps in faster deployments of the applications while ensuring scalability and portability.
4. Run
Prepare a standard management and operations approach to run the application seamlessly and ensure faster problem resolution. Implement governance, compliance, and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices to ensure continuous reliability and availability of the app, monitor its performance, and minimize system failures. This will ensure your team can focus on incident response management and reduce the chances of security breaches and downtime.
5 Key Benefits of Legacy Application Modernization Services
As mentioned above, there are various reasons why you must leverage application modernization. According to a study by Global Market Insights, the app modernization market size is valued at 19.8 billion as of 2022 and is estimated to grow over
10% by 2032. This explains how various businesses have already adopted this practice, and many others will soon include it in their business operations. Nevertheless, here are some critical benefits of app modernization services.
1. Meet Changing Business Requirements
Business prerequisites change after some time, relying upon the preferences of their clients. To meet these changes, nonstop improvement is fundamental. Application modernization services provide a set of tools and processes that assist associations with modernizing their inheritance applications and meeting changing business demands.
2. Technological Advancement
Technology constantly evolves with new tools and tech stacks that help improve application management. It must comply with various regulations and standards to make your app compatible with changing technology. Modernizing the app can help in this case, as it will make the application ready for advancements and integration with the latest technologies such as AI, cloud, and ML. App modernization also promotes continuous improvements that enable them to quickly release new updates in the app and improve its performance and efficiency. Also, you can check out a dedicated blog on top
Application Modernization Trends that are empowering the cloud transformation landscape.
3. Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is one of the major steps in assuring the quality and effectiveness of software. While manual intervention in the QA process can be time-consuming, automating it will streamline the entire process and help the development team analyze what went wrong. Application modernization will help the organization completely change its infrastructure and integrate it with other tools such as databases, cloud platforms, DevOps tools, and DevSecOps practices. Leveraging these tools will enable better testing and maintenance of the apps, resulting in improved outcomes and customer experience.
4. Security and Global Visibility
You can expand your business landscape and gain global visibility by leveraging application modernization services and transforming your on-premise apps to a cloud-native environment. A professional app modernization company can help restructure your app’s architecture and seamlessly migrate it to the cloud without causing data breaches and disruptions. Cloud encourages end-to-end security implementation, and cloud platforms use viable security methods to ensure your data is secured at every stage and is encrypted to protect it from unauthorized access.
5. User Satisfaction
Client satisfaction is a critical component that can ensure the success of your product in the competitive market. With constant improvement and modernizing the application, you can guarantee your application meets the changing requirements of the users and promotes customer loyalty. To advance client fulfillment, you should consistently attain constructive reviews from your target users, analyze the information, and change the application's architecture and UI for a superior user experience.
6. Cost Efficiency
Upgrading and maintaining applications imposes significant costs for an organization. But at the same time, they can reduce them by choosing an alternative strategy to streamline and automate their operations. By leveraging app modernization services, businesses can implement automation and reduce manual work in IT operations to save unnecessary expenses. Additionally, with continuous improvements and modifications, they can continuously use better ways to reduce costs wherever possible.
Top 10 App Modernization Best Practices
By now, you must have understood the importance of app modernization. In the section, we will discuss the key best practices you must follow to transform your system and applications.
1. Set Measurable Goals
Connecting your modernization endeavors to the measurable goals of your business permits you to enhance the efficiency of your app. For instance, immersive UI/UX design backed by modern features like AI-enabled chatbots can ensure a better user experience. To start the objective-setting process, you should recognize the priority apps that require modernization. Then, investigate how your organization would profit from increased reliability, adaptability, and performance by utilizing cloud services.
2. Explore and Choose the Right Modernization Approach
When it comes to choosing the app modernization approach, there are six in line- Rehost, Refactor, Replatform, Rearchitect, Rebuild, and Replace. You can begin the process by choosing any of these approaches and then incline others as required.
For example, you can use the Rebuild approach to revamp the application code from scratch without changing its scope. You can then Rehost it to a high-level architecture for better scalability. Otherwise, you can utilize the Replace approach to update the old features with new ones and eliminate all the connected obsoleteness from your application. Remember that each application modernization approach offers its own benefits that would be useful. The idea is to pick the ones that best suit your necessities.
3. Define a Clear Project Timeline
Every project needs to have a dedicated timeline and app modernization is no exception. You must have a clear understanding of the objectives and deadline of the project to ensure the development can comply with it. Communicate the set priorities with the team and direct them to complete the project within your decided timeframe.
4. Choose the Right Architecture
The app's architecture plays a significant part in the app modernization project. It decides if your product is fit for a multi-system integration or not. Picking the right architecture is an unquestionable requirement, particularly when you intend to modernize your legacy software. You must select the ones with a strong foundation with numerous benefits and fewer constraints. Moreover, you want to guarantee that your picked architecture is compatible with modern software development practices like DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, Agile (Scrum, Lean, and XP), and other potential robotization processes.
5. Prioritize Team Skill Set and Competency
If you wish to facilitate an organization-wide transformation, deploying new applications or building a product from scratch is not the only thing you need to focus on. This sort of progress requires the presence of the right set of skills and capabilities in your hired software development company. Accordingly, you must implement application modernization best practices like assessing existing abilities and the absence of required skills. It’s essential to have a well-equipped team of experts to support this change.
6. Documenting Every Detail
Documentation is one of the significant application modernization best practices that can take your business to a higher level. This practice significantly optimizes your application and supports your digital transformation journey. You really need to motivate the development team to document every detail from the project’s commencement and development to deployment and final launch. Ensure to cover all aspects, including files, features/functionalities, processes, etc.
7. Implementing DevOps
The application modernization services implement automation to accelerate your product development cycle and promote faster time-to-market. Here are some ways to incorporate automation into your SDLC process-
- Harness the power of DevOps to get automation at each level of development, implement the CI/CD pipeline, and expedite the entire process.
- Use DataOps to improve your data delivery process to data analysts and scientists for better insights and decision-making.
- You can also utilize XOps (an extension of DevOps) to shorten the development cycle and ensure better collaboration amongst developers, IT professionals, and data scientists.
8. Security Implementation
The reason why legacy applications need to be modernized is because they lack optimum security and need to be addressed before they threaten business operations. By app modernization, you can leverage DevSecOps, implement security mechanisms at every level of SDLC, and ensure the system is protected from vulnerabilities.
9. Migrating Apps to Microservices Architecture
Embracing application modernization is significant for hardware and software. A typical approach to do this is by moving your monolithic apps to microservices design. The microservices architecture simplifies the development process and eliminates the dependencies hindering monolithic applications. Migrating to containers and microservices can make your applications more adaptable and versatile than ever before. It helps in future-proofing your apps while at the same time permitting you to make modifications as and when required without disrupting the running services.
10. Identify Bottlenecks with Performance Metrics
Your work isn’t over with application modernization. Instead, it’s a continuous process where you need to track the performance metrics and ensure continuous improvement.
Some of the primary metrics you need to track include:
* Response Time: This metric measures the amount of time to process a request and a response to be returned.
* Throughput: The number of units you can process per unit of time.
* Memory Usage: It tells the amount of memory used by the app.
Bottom Line
In the realm of digital transformation, migrating to the cloud and modernizing legacy apps have become essential. By leveraging application modernization services, businesses can quickly improve their efficiency and performance and power their apps with trending technologies to enhance customer experience. Additionally, they can utilize the above-mentioned best practices to ensure their legacy app modernization efforts are successful. Since modernizing the app in-house can be difficult, consider partnering with a reliable software development company. A professional development team will be well-equipped to handle your app modernization needs and will employ a structured process to help you transform your business operations.
.jpg)
