Top 5 Best Practices to Modernize Legacy Applications

Top 5 Best Practices to Modernize Legacy Applications

Legacy applications are the backbone of a significant portion of many modern organizations; the downside of such software is that they can require a lot of maintenance and financial investments to keep them in running condition. Considering requirements, it is challenging to keep these applications up and running, without incurring substantial costs and investing a lot of wasted time into the maintenance process. Despite cost and time investments, these legacy applications can’t be shown the door.

Legacy applications are used to gauge the performance of business operations. What if an organization wants to progress by staying in sync with technology, and continue making use of these technological tools to aid this advancement? In other words, in the era of the Cloud, legacy applications can come across as a little outdated, and their performance can remain restricted. However, the idea is to modernize these legacy applications, and speed up their processing prowess, to reduce costs and maximize productivity.

Legacy Applications — The List of Problems Continue

With all said and done, it is safe to say that organizations and DevOps teams have successfully trudged forward on the path of application modernization; however, these projects are occasionally time-bound and are unable to meet the targeted timelines, which creates vendor lock-in. Organizations have to choose between a single Cloud platform and container vendors, which increases the overall maintenance price over a period.

Applications such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc., have been built in the form of unbreakable monoliths — this means that the data associated with these applications provides excellent data security and networking options to the resident organizations. When it comes to upgrading the features of these applications in a specific manner, organizations might end up with a roadblock most of the time — even small updates will mean undertaking a long, slow testing process.

To break down the traditional stereotypes of these legacy applications, and replace them with newer more efficient application versions, it’s essential to follow these five best procedures and then decide the best approach to move forward:

Breaking the Monolith to Garner Efficiency

Break down the legacy application, from the networking needs to the overall structure to the storage configurations, and how it will look on a virtual platform. Breaking down software into separate individual components will make it easier to recreate the new model within containers; however, this approach is more feasible when it is implemented at a significant scale.

Separate Applications From Infrastructure

If the legacy applications have an underlying dependency on the organization’s infrastructure, the chances are that you would need to separate everything piece by piece, before moving onto a new platform. Check out the feasibility of the code, and the platforms it can run on. During separation, the idea is to avoid making any drastic changes, so that everything can be picked and moved when the time comes. By gaining an advantage over the traditional monoliths, you would be able to make use of storage containers, cloud environments, and different storage options to move to a platform which offers security, price, and performance, all rolled into one bundle.

The Costs of Decommissioning

When you start pulling apart legacy applications into different components, it is essential to catalog every piece, along with the cost to replicate such. Some features might be easy to implement, while others might come across as light on the pocket. At the same time, other components will be difficult to achieve and might require a lot of investment to move from one platform to another. By having a clear-cut idea on the cost, and the immediate needs, developers and operations teams can pick and choose the components needed and the combinations which need to be replicated.

Security Building is a Necessity

If you are pushing security implementation post-deployment, then you need to take a step back and start reevaluating the options. Security needs to be fused within every stage of application rebuilding, and it should be given utmost priority during the pick and drop phase. As each component is reimaged and reinvented, security can be layered between each element, and the process will become foolproof.

DevOps is the Key to Strong Results

DevOps means working together; in this case, it’s all about the operations team and the developers’ team working hand in hand to arrive at a proper, well-augmented solution. When these teams work in tandem with each other, the chances are that there will be a faster turnaround of new platforms, as more and more component combinations will be decoded and shifted from one platform to another.

In other words, the DevOps teams will be in a better position to understand what is needed, and what is not; they can also jointly decide the combinations required to bring to the new platform, thereby eradicating the need of adding on useless components, which are of no value going forth.

Also Read

How Big Data is Changing the Business World and Why it Matters
How Cloud-Native Architectures will Reshape Enterprise Workloads
Top 6 Methods to Protect Your Cloud Data from Hackers
How Big Data Is Changing the Financial Industry

The Challenges and Benefits of Modernizing Legacy Applications in Cloud

The Challenges and Benefits of Modernizing Legacy Applications in Cloud
It was right from its inception that cloud computing displayed a revolutionizing potential—it had an unforeseen scope over diverse targets including individuals, companies and governments. The major services available in these sectors and the ever growing inventions of the modern world do indeed call for a more advanced and flexible application of cloud computing. It is seen by many as the new wave of information technology. In 2010, the World Economic Forum published a report which evaluated the impact of cloud computing technologies and signaled the large potential benefits of adoption, ranging from economic growth and potential improvements in employment to facilitating innovation and collaboration.

Need being the mother of invention, Cloud has evolved beyond basic SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS offerings, as the cloud matures to become the engine of enterprise technology innovation. It is moving towards a faster and more efficient world. However, the Information Technology is increasing its demands to solve the arising complexities. Take for example the modernizing of legacy applications in cloud. It extends both challenges and opportunities, as the facets of a coin, but in each way it moves towards a more advanced and intricate web of complexities.

Most of the large enterprises run at least some form of a legacy application, for which updates and replacements can sometimes be tricky. However, failing to modernize out-of-date systems may hinder the pace of information exchange due to slow runtime speeds and inefficient load balancing. Many organizations have, thus, begun to modernize their legacy applications which will yield long term benefits such as portability and scalability, better speed and resource management, and granular visibility.

Since the start, enterprises have run on time-consuming manual processes and tools that are involved with legacy applications also hinders modernizing efforts. Manual processes take up significant amount of time and still leave room for errors. However, at the same time, enterprises say they need to move to the cloud, but they don’t really understand why, nor do they realize how difficult it can be. This includes applying cloud services to a non-compatible old legacy application and facing challenges when trying to re-host. They must be cautious of the processes involved in migrating the valuable data. If one moves one application to cloud which has business logic or IT logic of another application that isn’t migrated to cloud, they might run into issues. Therefore, it is better to consult the professionals before landing into problems. In this league of advancement, the infrastructure might face challenges such as:

Cost adjustments: The cost of maintaining and upgrading Legacy systems renders the firm a challenge of combatting the financial balance. The challenge preparers the employees learn the skills of pulling the firm through the tight passage without de-establishing the financial pace of the organization.

Inflexible and closed architectures: There are some architectures used by organizations that hinder Web and mobile enabling and integration with contemporary platforms, therefore, they turn out to be challenging opportunities for the modern minds at work.

Limited Integration: Legacy systems might sometimes not go in cohesion with the integration to contemporary technologies like Mobile Apps/Devices, Enterprise Content Management Systems, Automated Workflow, E-Forms/E-Signatures, Geographic Information Systems, and so on, therefore pose a major obstacle for the integrators.

User Friendliness: The existing system uses command-based screens and cannot provide a contemporary Graphical User Interface (GUI), web, or mobile which have become commonplace, however, if it is in constant practice, the newer models of commanding may pose an oddity for quite some time for the old hands. Therefore, the migrators have to go an extra mile to ease the way by employing less complicated systems.

On the other hand, there are various benefits of applying this modernization. If the engineers handle the aforementioned challenges wisely and implement the newer technology with greater precision, there indeed some charming benefits await, such as:

Enhanced flexibility: Creates a flexible IT environment with new architectural paradigms such as web services; aligns IT systems to dynamic business needs.

Modern development tools: Legacy and new developers can use the same or similar tools, enabling both to develop Legacy applications.

Lower risks: Re-use of business rules where data becomes less risky than alternatives.

Shorter development times: Modernizes development tools and retrains developers which lead to shorter development times.

Reduced cost: Lowers high maintenance cost of existing old fashioned Legacy platforms and development tools, resulting in substantial savings in IT budgets.

Minimized disruption: Reduces the risk when modernizing Legacy platforms by combining two decades of development experience with contemporary platforms, a proven modernization framework and rich domain knowledge.

Related Stories

Machine Learning’s Impact on Cloud Computing