How to Create an Effective Roadmap for Application Modernization

In today’s business environment, application modernization is a hot topic. If your organization is like the majority of them, you likely have a mix of applications that are essential to your daily operations and applications that are infrequently or no longer required. It’s critical to step back & orchestrate the strategy as your company expands, changes, and determines which applications must be updated to remain competitive. Legacy application modernization services can empower your brands & businesses if you choose to have them outsourced!

To remain competitive, businesses must quickly adapt to shifting market conditions and customer demands. Businesses can increase productivity, shorten the time to market, and improve customer experiences by modernizing their applications.

There are various steps that go into application modernization. However, if you want a sustainable app modernization strategy, there are various ways to go about it.

1. Conduct thorough Viability Studies

As early as 2018, 87% of businesses knew digital conformance would disrupt their operations. Only 44% of respondents claimed to be ready for this scenario, though. This disruption primarily appeared as COVID-19 in 2020. While other businesses shut down to prepare for the pandemic and its requirements for social isolation, those who were prepared could use cloud services to continue operating from anywhere.

The best time for legacy application modernization services is right now if you’ve been meaning to do so. Conduct a viability study to determine whether you should update your on-premises environment to support cloud-native technologies, such as microservices, or move entirely to the cloud.

You should update current code or outdated on-premises applications if you face any of these:

- Your app doesn’t support the working from home or supporting digital services needs of your target users today or in the future.

- It is challenging to integrate the legacy system with other tools in your tech stack due to compatibility issues.

- System updates, security patches, and other assistance from your original vendor are no longer available to you.

- Costly scaling, maintenance, and updates.

- Employee productivity is impacted by crashing, slowness, and reboots. — Users (including both employees and customers) also voice complaints about their bad experiences.

2. Conduct Thorough Initial Assessment

As your legacy application modernization services kick-off, evaluate your objectives:

- Why should you benefit?

- What do you stand to lose?

- What will the price be?

- What effect will the modernization effort have on your business, and how long will it take?

- When should modernization begin in order to prevent service interruptions?

- Will you require redundancy and backup systems to maintain services?

- Would professional application modernization services be helpful to you on your journey? Should you handle it internally instead?

After these objectives have been aligned, focus on the goal.

3. Establish SMART Legacy Goals to Track Your Progress

You shouldn’t just abandon antiquated technology for its aesthetic appeal. The modernization program can be justified more effectively by using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

For instance, you can use an architecture that enables you to initially decouple your monolithic application into several smaller services. You can reduce interruptions and distribute the cost of software development by gradually improving the smaller services.

4. Choose A Functional Architecture for The Modernization Plan

In this step, your most knowledgeable software engineers must evaluate the current code architecture. In essence, you must identify the necessary changes before modernizing anything.

For instance, if you want to move legacy apps to the cloud, you might need to refactor existing code to make it cloud-ready. A lift-and-shift migration might be your best bet if you need a quick and inexpensive cloud migration. The drawback of this is that it restricts the variety of cloud-native technologies you can provide or work with.

For instance, when using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), you might want to experiment with options like single-tenancy and multi-tenancy architecture if you prefer running workloads on a pre-made solution to creating infrastructure from scratch.

However, if you need to create unique programs that are similar to your current ones — perhaps to facilitate user onboarding and workflow changes, you must choose whether you want to use:

- A single microservices architecture

- Application containerization using containers and microservices

- containers using an orchestration tool for containers like Kubernetes or Docker

- monolithic interface microservices

- Localized microservices supported by the on-premises architecture

- Each strategy has advantages and disadvantages as well as long-term effects on service delivery, customer experience, and your IT budget.

5. Execution

Most organizations experience cloud costs that rise rather than go down due to inadequate application modernization or application optimization strategies, such as subpar cost governance. As a result, there is significant waste and unnecessary spending on IT.

Some projects introduce infrastructure misconfigurations and holes in data security, endangering their modernization goals. According to Gartner, these issues are primarily the result of inexperienced developers carrying out the modernizations. Because of this, it’s crucial to ensure your best software developers are at the forefront of your project to modernize legacy systems.

6. Incorporate continuous development through DevOps

Planning for checks and balances will ensure that your modernization strategy is implemented in accordance with the plan you established at the outset.

Continuous improvement strategies can support a smooth, effective, and timely transition, for example, if you choose to modernize legacy applications over a three-year period. Utilizing DevOps workflows will also guarantee that your engineers follow clearly defined procedures, allowing you to keep your roadmap focused on being cloud-ready or digital-first.

Conclusion

Knowing what to do before getting a legacy application modernization services project will help you transition smoothly. Modernizing your legacy apps is made simpler by skilled developers. Qualified near-shore solutions, however, might be able to help if you’re having trouble finding qualified software engineers.

You can find vetted and knowledgeable modernization specialists at Golpik Inc. who can work with you to update apps affordably, prevent service interruptions and properly train your users. Schedule a time with us to review your desired legacy application modernization solutions.