From Legacy to Leading Edge: How Modernizing Applications Fuels Business Growth
- Sharon Glenn
- Nov 29, 2023
- 7 min read
Application modernization is a crucial component of digital transformation. This process of embracing new technologies to improve efficiency and productivity, enhance customer experience, innovate faster, and gain a competitive edge helps drive business growth.
Introduction to Legacy Application Modernization
The Need for Application Modernization in Today's Digital Era
Digital strategy is now deeply intertwined with overall business strategy.
A 2022 Gartner survey revealed that 89% of board directors confirm that digital is now embedded in business growth strategies. Gartner also confirms that the responsibility for digital transformation is shifting to CEOs and IT leaders, who must ensure the existence of digital growth drivers. CEO scrutiny adds further pressure on CIOs and CTOs to deliver improvements.
Arguably, one of the most challenging yet most important aspects of digital transformation is updating or replacing legacy applications. Adding new standalone technologies is far simpler than shifting existing operations from embedded outdated systems that existing processes rely upon.
Gartner further found that software enhancement, modernizing existing systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, is second only to adopting artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) in breakthrough technologies imperative to digital business success. Jorge Lopez, VP Analyst at Gartner, describes these existing tools as “complex and rigid” when businesses need “agility and change.”
The CRSS Approach to Modernization
At CRSS, we offer the technical expertise required to develop strategic and tactical roadmaps for digital evolution via practical solutions that minimize disruption to existing opportunities. To achieve this, we leverage key enterprise technologies. We’re an IBM Redhat partner and accomplished software architects, cloud engineers, and DevOps experts.
Understanding Legacy Systems and Modernization
The Role of Legacy Systems in Organizations
Applications and technologies become legacy systems when they no longer enable the efficiencies or identify the opportunities a thriving business needs and when they start to fail or incur maintenance costs and challenges. Legacy systems were once cutting-edge applications, but the pace of digital transformation means that systems that were optimal even five or ten years ago could now be hindering and not aiding business performance.
Business Landscape and Legacy Application Limitations
The limitations of legacy applications and their impact on business operations can include the following:
Maintenance and update costs and a lack of expertise in outdated systems
Reduced speeds and inefficient performance
Inability to scale or integrate old systems with new
Failure to support customer needs
Lack of support for third-party elements that have expired
Inability to cope with large volumes of data or provide data-driven insights
Impact on staff retention, who expect the latest tools for their work
Security and compliance risks
If your existing technology stack experiences the pain of these limitations, it's time to consider application modernization to evolve and enhance your business performance.
Why Modernize Legacy Applications?
Legacy systems, by definition, have been superseded by more advanced technologies. Modernization is a journey that takes advantage of the benefits of new technologies to improve business performance and serve customers better.
Benefits of Modernization and Migrating to Cloud Services
Modern cloud-based solutions offer efficiency, scalability, agility, speed, and security. They can leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data to empower businesses and deliver data-driven decision-making to drive profits. Some of the benefits can include:
Identification of new markets and accelerated time to market
Improved user and customer experiences
Attractive tech stack makes for easier hiring of both IT staff and system users
Better ability to adapt to and adopt new technologies
Opportunity to develop custom applications and systems
Greater cybersecurity protection and data compliance
Making the Shift to Modern Technology and Cloud Platforms
Legacy application modernization can take several approaches. Businesses may need to choose from completely rebuilding outdated systems from the ground up, replacing some or all existing infrastructure elements with off-the-shelf products, switching external providers, or refactoring to take advantage of features and data from existing systems.
Digitally transforming and shifting to new technologies and cloud platforms requires carefully analyzing existing legacy systems and how new technologies can be aligned with business goals. This analysis should then be followed by crafting a modernization strategy supported at every level of the operational hierarchy.
Crafting the Right Modernization Strategy
Legacy systems may be costly and inefficient, but they may still be critical to day-to-day operations; thus, a modernization project must be approached carefully to reproduce or retain the benefits of any existing systems whilst removing the constraints of these outdated applications. Legacy application modernization can be costly in itself, be time-consuming, and require the support of external expertise.
Analyzing the Existing Legacy System
An analysis of an existing legacy system begins with an understanding of why the software or system was built initially. What goals did it serve? What were the critical business functions? Choosing a new system or design will take the same approach based on today's features and benefits.
Other aspects to analyze can include the costs of the outdated system, any dependencies between applications or third parties that must be identified, and the security risks associated with retiring old systems and migrating or archiving data.
Planning for Migration Costs and User Experience
Understanding the costs of a legacy system can help to balance the burden of developing new modern infrastructure and account for the cost of migrating systems and deploying them internally and externally. The price of migrating data, business functions, and system users can easily match the investment in new technology or service providers.
Tools and Techniques for Efficient Migration
An efficient migration approach will depend on the results of a legacy system analysis, the problems that must be solved, and the business goals that must be achieved. Modernization options, encaptured by Gartner, include:
Rehost
Moving an application to a more dependable infrastructure, e.g., the cloud.
Replatform
Migrating to a new platform, making minimal changes to application coding.
Refactor
Restructure and optimize existing applications and data without changing data or functionality.
Rearchitect
Moving to new application architecture to exploit new and better capabilities and integrations.
Rebuild
Redesigning legacy applications from scratch while preserving function scope and specifications.
Replace
Altogether, discontinue legacy applications, replacing them with new software and systems, interfaces, processes, and functionality.
Leveraging Cloud Providers like Azure and AWS
Legacy applications are often mainframe hosted in-house, requiring expensive hardware and growing internal data centers. Moving to the cloud can expedite digital transformation, providing scalability, flexibility, greater security, and reduced costs. As well as our partnership with IBM, CRSS can facilitate your transition to a reliable cloud provider, such as Microsoft Azure or AWS. Our approach can fit with yours, whether to rehost, re-architecture, or rebuild and replace in the cloud. Azure and AWS also facilitate containerization and microservices.
The Role of Refactoring and Automation in Migration
Refactoring is an automated option that transfers legacy code and data to modern platforms without interrupting business operations by creating new systems, which users and customers must first learn before maximizing the benefits. Refactoring can be an option to retain UI/UX from terminal-based applications but instead, replicate the usability in a browser. Such systems can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. With this approach, IT teams no longer have to support older mainframes or secure data, saving resources. The new systems don’t require downtime to transition or for training, and they are compatible with new technologies, agile development, and DevOps processes for continuous improvement.
Critical Considerations for Migration and Modernization Success
Ensuring Security During Data Migration
Risk Assessment and Data Protection
Data is now seen as the lifeblood of any digitally optimized organization. It’s also the most vulnerable element to cyber attacks, which can destroy businesses. Data must be protected from threats during any modernization or migration, including accidental losses and intentional breaches. Data protection begins with an internal risk assessment as part of the modernization strategy and should include evaluating any chosen technologies or service providers.
Encryption, Access Control, and Disaster Recovery
The next steps to protect data should include in-transit encryption, access control and disaster recovery plans, and comprehensive backup strategies. Security Intelligence, with insights from IBM experts, summarizes the areas of concern.
Continuous Optimization and Application Modernization to Fuel Business Growth
The Role of DevOps in Modernization
DevOps also has a role as a tool in legacy application modernization. It facilitates collaboration between development and operations teams, focusing on automation and continuous delivery.
A DevOps approach can build on a modernization strategy by extraditing the deployment and updating of new applications faster, allowing your business to iterate in response to changing markets, customers, and technologies. DevOps also automates and integrates testing and quality assurance and embraces effective monitoring and analytics, optimizing error-free deployments and allowing for data-driven insights for continuous improvement.
Capitalizing on Legacy Application Modernization Benefits
Viewing Modernization as a Strategic Business Move
We’ve encapsulated briefly how application modernization is not just a digital strategy or a part of digital transformation but a strategic business move to leverage the benefits of new and emerging technologies to innovate faster, improve customer provision, and fuel business growth in a changing world. To truly capitalize on modernization benefits, and as a recap, it’s essential to:
Effectively analyze the purpose, function, and failures of legacy systems
Choose an application modernization strategy that aligns with your business goals and investment perimeters today
Identify the appropriate technology stack for effective transformation
Partner with experts who can deliver practical analysis and cutting-edge insights and implement and support modernization strategy.
Harvard Business Review (HBR), analyzing McKinsey data from the banking sector, where digital transformation has been prevalent for longer, drew findings on the value of digital transformation. HBR concludes that digital leaders grew sales by between 40% and 70% while “digital laggards” could only drive market growth of 8% to 17%.
More broadly, Deloitte estimates that unlocking digital transformation that adds value creates “outsized returns on tech investments,” with the right combination of transformation components having the potential to unlock as much as $1.25 trillion in additional market capitalization across all Fortune 500 companies.
The Journey of Transformation and Growth with CRSS
Legacy application modernization can range from simple system modifications and facilitated migration to the cloud or involve more complex re-architecture and software replacement.
CRSS empowers companies with modern technology solutions by offering strategic partnerships that overcome business constraints and deliver the digital transformation that will fuel business growth.
Ready to elevate your business with cutting-edge digital solutions? Discover the transformative power of CRSS's digital solutions, including Software Design and development, Cloud Engineering, and DevOps. Partner with us to leverage these services for enhanced innovation and business growth. Contact CRSS today and take the first step towards a digitally empowered future.
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