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 In other words, in the era of the Cloud, legacy applications can come across as a little outdated, and their performance can remain restricted.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.

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