Technological advancements and digital innovation are significantly altering business processes, products, and services, enabling organizations to restructure themselves to adapt to this trend. This restructuring—called digital transformation—is the new foundation that organizations are using to deliver value to their customers. With enterprises embracing cloud-native and digital transformation technologies, the application modernization landscape is gaining momentum, accelerating the organization’s digital journey.
Make your business future proof with application modernization
Organizations using legacy systems require huge resources to maintain existing applications, thereby hindering innovation while consuming resource bandwidth. Moreover, existing systems are hard to replace as they are central to business operations and carry vital organizational information. Enterprises are starting to realize this and are gradually adopting legacy modernization by investing in the latest approaches to upgrade their applications while reducing maintenance costs.
Application modernization helps organizations stay on top of their business imperatives by aligning them to IT investments. This develops agility, improves operational efficiency, and delivers an excellent customer experience.
“According to MarketsandMarkets, the global application modernization market is expected to grow to USD 24.8 billion by 2025.” Growth of cloud services, migration of workloads to the cloud or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the rise in demand for modern infrastructure are considered the key factors driving application modernization. To sustain the rapid technology evolution and the demands of current market trends, organizations are urged to modernize their legacy systems and increase application migration services.
Application modernization services
Various application modernization services include cloud application migration, cloud deployment, hybrid cloud, application re-platforming, and application portfolio assessment. These are discussed below.
Application re-platforming
Re-platforming applies legacy applications that are converted into more efficient cloud applications with enhanced system features and functionalities to support and avail the features of the cloud. Simply put, re-platforming is nothing but application cloud migration with low code changes to consume maximum cloud benefits. This approach is more suitable for organizations unwilling to change the core application architecture and business logic yet leverage the cloud features.
Re-platforming offers faster application delivery, reduced TCO, faster networking speed, and shorter time-to-market. Below are some of the expected changes implemented during application re-platforming that will help avail the common cloud components such as auto-scaling, auto-dynamic loading, etc.
- Expose service methods as micro or macro services.
- Identify code blockers incompatible with the cloud and replace them.
- Convert the on-premises database to a cloud database.
Re-platforming helps you overcome the major disadvantages of rewriting, which is time-consuming, and rehosting, which does not take full advantage of the cloud.
Hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud is a mixed computing, storage, and services environment comprised of on-premises infrastructure and private and public cloud services. Cloud promises agility, speed, and cost-savings and supports a fast-moving digital transformation. Hybrid cloud solutions help solve complex cloud challenges such as data gravity, regulatory compliance, cost management, security, and the need for organizational change.
Applications that can reside on hybrid cloud infrastructures—with the help of containerization and microservices, utilizing the best of public and private features—have increased the demand for application modernization.
Characteristics of hybrid cloud architecture
- A hybrid cloud enables an organization to match data management requirements to the public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises resources—whatever best suits them.
- On-premises data centers, private and public cloud resources, and workloads stay distinct but are linked together under common data management.
- An easily scalable public cloud can be used for dynamic workloads while retaining more sensitive or less volatile workloads to a private cloud or on-premises data center.
- Public cloud resources can be used for short-term projects at a lower cost in a hybrid environment, preventing overinvestment in expensive physical assets.
Application portfolio assessment
Application assessment is an automated objective analysis of your portfolio’s structural and architectural quality of applications. Lack of understanding of your IT landscape can degrade performance, security, and stability, potentially bringing down entire systems while driving up maintenance costs. In fact, application assessment helps delivery teams do a better job communicating with business partners and aligning with business constituents.
Application portfolio assessment is an exercise to assess applications and systems against a set of parameters such as cost, ease of migration, migration benefits, etc., to determine which applications and systems are suitable to host on the cloud.
Application assessment objectives include
- Identify coding mistakes and improve production stability
- Identify violations in the application’s last release
- Detect performance issues and improve end-user experience
- Compare application quality across portfolios to identify problem areas
- Understand the structural quality of applications to manage maintenance budgets
Cloud application migration
Application migration is the process of moving a software application from an on-premises server to a cloud provider’s environment or from the public to a private cloud environment. Moving applications to a new environment can pose a number of challenges, particularly if they have been developed for a single cloud platform or specific network architectures.
Different applications can take different paths to the cloud even within the same technological environment. Hence, it is important to determine the right application strategy based on each application’s dependencies and technical requirements plus your enterprise’s compliance, security, and cost constraints.
Different cloud migration strategies
- Re-host, known as lift-and-shift, is a common strategy in which enterprises move applications from an on-premises server to a virtual machine in the cloud without making significant changes.
- Re-platforming an application involves making changes to it to benefit from cloud architecture.
- Refactor or re-architecture refers to making significant changes to the application to scale and perform better in a cloud environment.
- Retire or replace refers to decommissioning the application when it is more cost-effective to replace it with a new offering rather than simply migrating the application.
Cloud deployment
Hosting an application either through the software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model to the cloud is known as cloud deployment. There are private, public, hybrid, and community models, and enterprises choose a deployment model based on the user and needs of the organization.
Following are some of the benefits of an effective cloud deployment model:
- Automate builds (including resource provisioning) that deploy code, databases, and application releases.
- Control costs based on consumption and eliminate CAPEX-heavy on-premises environments.
- Leverage the global infrastructure offered by various cloud service providers and seamlessly expand the business into other geographies.
- Overcome fault tolerance, disaster recovery and ensure business continuity of applications to make the business resilient.
- Without provisioning for excess capacity, use autoscaling and scalability to meet peak demands of the business.
- Increase productivity by empowering users with portals, DevOps pipelines, operational dashboards, and other self-service options on the cloud.
Legacy application modernization powered by PreludeSys
PreludeSys offers progressive solutions to move you past traditional software and insufficient digital tools that limit your organization’s workflow. PreludeSys—a Microsoft Gold Partner—can help you find the perfect balance with application modernization and various cloud-based solutions. With a proven record of digitally empowering 50+ companies worldwide, we are committed to providing profitable solutions. We can implement tailored legacy modernization strategies and help you address future challenges. To learn more about our legacy application modernization services, feel free to reach out to us anytime.
