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Technology is constantly evolving, and many new technologies are coming up every day. As a result, businesses must continuously develop and adapt to this technological evolution. Unfortunately, most organizations find it challenging to bridge the gap between growing user expectations and their application’s legacy infrastructure in real time. It’s almost as if you’re forcing a bullock cart to keep up with a rocket.
The digital transformation market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.1% from $594.5 billion in 2022 to $1548.9 billion in 2027, according to the Markets and Markets 2022 research report.
Any business that fails to adapt to change will fall far behind in the race to meet the expectations of its customers. Can this be resolved? Fortunately, yes! Application Modernization comes across as the perfect fit in these changing times. It is estimated that the global market for app modernization will reach $50,440 million by 2028. Let us help you understand more about application modernization.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is the process of migrating from legacy platforms to a cloud model. It entails a cloud-native approach in which on-premises applications are moved to the public, private, or hybrid cloud. App modernization aids in the modernization of frameworks, languages, and architecture.
This approach meets rising customer expectations while improving the application’s scalability, flexibility, security, and infrastructure. Modernization will also aid in seamless integration with other systems, allowing businesses to focus entirely on their vision while progressing in their journey.
Why should a business modernize its existing legacy system?
Firstly, let’s define what a legacy system is. How do you know if your system is a legacy system? Any application that slows down organizational growth, cannot align with rising user expectations, and proves to be a hurdle in achieving an organization’s goal is considered a perfect candidate for app modernization.
The following attributes can assist you in identifying a legacy system:
- Applications that use archaic libraries, frameworks, development platforms, and OS.
- Any monolithic or tightly coupled system that can cause a delay in deployment with possibly high defect rates.
- A large amount of dead or unused code.
- Outdated security frameworks, which will lead to cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
- System that needs manual deployment.
- Systems that are time-consuming and non-profitable.
- Systems that are not scalable on-demand
- Applications that cannot provide a modern user experience.
- Systems that are not distributed for global business needs.
- Insufficient platform security
According to the financial times, BFSI organizations dedicate up to 75% of their IT budgets to preserving their legacy systems. 75% of the IT budget going towards maintaining legacy systems is very alarming.
If the limitations mentioned above are not resolved, they can seriously affect an organization’s growth. A vulnerable application that lacks adequate security is an easy target for hackers. Any security issues can cost a company money and time. Regarding performance, legacy apps can lag behind modernized applications in many ways. This can lead to difficulties and harm the goodwill that a brand has built up over time.
Did you know? Application Modernization can:
- Help to save on infrastructure costs by 15-35% year on year.
- Reduce the cost of maintaining and operating applications by 30-50%.
- Reduce hardware, software, and personnel costs by 74%.
- Increase 14% in annual revenue, averaging $ 1 billion for large organizations.
7 Key benefits of App Modernization
1. Faster Go-To-Market
Modernization enables the use of the most recent tech stack, improves scalability, and makes the system more flexible for adding new features. This greatly reduces the go-to-market time.
On the other hand, when a legacy system becomes obsolete, it becomes less flexible to add new features using new technologies, making it difficult for businesses to operate at their maximum efficiency. It also becomes challenging to keep up with the expectations of a growing user base. This apart, expanding a company’s operations and increasing its radar is incredibly tough.
Want to know how we modernized the legacy scheduling and monitoring system of a renowned transportation & logistics company and improved its efficiency?
Want to know how we modernized the legacy scheduling and monitoring system of a renowned transportation & logistics company and improved its efficiency?
2. Cost reduction
Since 2010, corporations and governments worldwide have spent a whopping $35 trillion on information technology products and services. Three-quarters of this amount was spent on operating and maintaining legacy systems.
Hiring specialists familiar with old tools and outdated technologies to maintain out-of-date apps is a recurring issue in industries today. They are not economically viable for businesses due to the high cost of maintaining outdated apps. These applications also require ample data storage in on-premises data centers.
3. Enhanced Customer Experience
With the advent of new technologies, there are increasing expectations of ease at work from employees and good user experience from customers. With modernization, the application can become more user-friendly and integrated with customer service bots, reducing manual work for company employees. As a result, customers get what they want, and employees are relieved of laborious, repetitive work, giving them more time to focus on important tasks. This, in turn, helps the business increase profits and meet its goals within the expected time. In addition, modernization gives businesses access to introduce and enhance features that result in better customer experience.
To stay ahead of the competition, Modernization enables organizations to integrate cutting-edge platforms and technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Big Data. It allows businesses to adapt their applications to current trends and technologies.
4. Enhanced Security
Cloud-native applications provide cutting-edge security features such as identity & authorization management and data security, improving security and preventing unauthorized access.
Cyber attackers find it easy to compromise legacy applications because they lack the ability to protect data and compete with evolving technologies. In addition, deprecated applications provide easy access to inject malware, and loopholes are easily discovered. Let us look at this scenario with an example.
Log4j is a well-known Java library that has been around since 2001 and is used for logging activity and error messages by numerous pieces of software. Log4j will log messages in the software before scanning them for errors. Its logging capabilities enable it to communicate with other internal system functions like directory services.
Cyber attackers can send messages to Log4j instructing it to download and execute malware from a remote server, granting the attacker additional access to the victim’s system. As a result, attackers can easily exploit the legacy system and gain access to information.
The log4j issue, discovered in December 2021, is regarded by security experts as one of the most severe threats to have emerged in recent years. The Log4j vulnerability is a remote code execution vulnerability that allows attackers to drop malware on a target system. This, in turn, can lead to the network’s complete compromise, the theft of sensitive information. Industrial sectors with vast legacy system arrangements are prone to this log4j issue.
5. Growth in Revenue
Modernization reduces infrastructure costs significantly. Efficiency rises as the application’s scalability and flexibility improve. Businesses can improve the customer experience by adding new features and streamlining existing processes. The time saved by automation can now be spent on expanding the application’s market reach and increasing revenue in various ways. The ability to innovate grows while maintenance costs fall rapidly.
Interested to know how you can increase your ROI with cloud? Read this blog.
6.Higher Efficiency and Scalability
App modernization allows the system to incorporate new technology while also increasing its scalability and efficiency. Scalability allows systems to scale across geographies and eliminates the need for a business to own data centers. Scaling across locations removes a big burden for businesses and helps them to globalize their business without much infrastructure cost and at ease. Eliminating the need for data centers cuts down expenditures greatly and helps the business to spend more on what is required.
By simplifying operations, modernization reduces the burden on IT operations. Modernization helps to automate deployments. It also provides an efficient platform for businesses to launch new products and services while reaching a larger audience in less time. In addition, a well-managed database and application maintenance flexibility can boost sales.
7. Increase in Productivity
Modernization facilitates integration and makes applications more efficient and user-friendly. Manual effort and time are significantly reduced with Robotic Process Automation. With repetitive tasks taken care of, productivity increases significantly.
Legacy applications are incompatible with modern systems and hardware; as a result, automation cannot be performed. This increases the manual effort to run the applications and the time spent. In addition, without consistent support from the application developer, employees may experience lags, bugs, and other errors when using such applications.
Key technologies involved in app modernization
It is imminent to know about the key technologies involved in the app modernization process. They are:
- Cloud Computing
- Serverless
- Containerization
- Kubernetes
- Microservices
- Orchestration and Automation
Myths about Application Modernization
1. App Modernization is expensive
It is common knowledge that on-premises systems are expensive to maintain and require specialists to handle various processes. On-premises systems have very high data storage costs, and software licenses are costly. Another expense that can reduce a company’s profit is maintenance costs.
Did you know?
- Legacy systems cause 48% of UK employees to waste three hours or more daily. That equates to 960 working days per year for a company with 5,000 employees.
- According to a study on the cost of maintaining legacy systems in the United States, operating and maintaining ten of the government’s legacy systems costs about $337 million per year.
- According to CIO Insight, businesses in the United States lose up to $1.8 trillion in productivity yearly due to outdated technology.
In comparison to all of this, app modernization reduces costs and increases the system’s flexibility and scalability. How can we say that for sure? We have written a detailed blog explaining the visible and invisible costs related to the cloud and how it can improve the ROI.
Quick Tip: The longer the tenure of cloud usage, the more you can save your money. Mostly all cloud service providers give discounts for committed usage of the cloud. Cloud not only has invisible costs but invisible cost savings too.
With app modernization, data storage is taken care of, and infrastructure costs are significantly reduced. Automation reallocates resources in the business to more critical tasks, increasing productivity and output efficiency.
2. Organizations will require more skilled workers after modernization
The truth is that maintaining legacy applications will require more skilled workers who are well-versed in legacy applications and technology. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find people who are skilled in obsolete technologies and hiring them is becoming more expensive. Modernization has the potential to reduce infrastructure, data maintenance, and IT costs greatly.
You can hire an experienced partner like Eleviant to modernize your applications. We can help you choose a combination of low-code services and platforms. You can build and update apps much faster with low-code platforms, allowing developers to share functionalities with stakeholders in a matter of hours or days. This will not only allow employees to focus more on critical functions, but it will also boost workplace morale. A good workplace increases productivity, not the other way around.
3. Improving user interface is application modernization
Improving user interface is undoubtedly beneficial to user engagement, but it is not the only concept involved with app modernization. Most applications have complex workflows; a simple UI improvement does not always improve the user experience. Only the usability component of UX is relevant to UI, while other components, such as extensibility and accessibility, heavily depend on the application’s tech composition. Therefore, to have any meaningful impact on app experience levels, modernization initiatives have to be extensively applied to every layer of the application.
Concluding thoughts
There are several steps involved in determining which applications to modernize, how to do it, and whether to do it at all. Choosing an experienced cloud partner to take you through the cloud journey will prove to be a wise decision. A good partner can help you create a strategy, plan and execute implementation successfully, and monitor it. As proud partners of Microsoft Azure and AWS and with an exceptional expertise in modern tech stack, we can make your transformation journey smooth and successful.
Contact us to begin your digital transformation journey!
