While IT outages have become obsolete to the modern business world, the growing emphasis of organizations on legacy application modernization has highlighted the issue again. Traditionally, it was a tedious activity to modernize legacy applications, which involved rewriting application codes. The determination was to salvage all existing parts of code and leverage it to generate value.
Throughout the process of legacy application modernization, organizations face immense pressure to do more, however, for many businesses that run almost completely on legacy applications, the process becomes overwhelming. Organizations simply cannot concentrate on the modernization process while maintaining cost-effectiveness. This is because they might have to begin the process again by the time their applications have been modernized.
When Must Organizations Focus on Legacy Application Modernization
In the current world of business, being a competitive participant is not enough. Organizations need to emphasize disruption as a key priority and for doing so, they need to surf on the wave of latest technologies. The aspects that make organizations reluctant to disrupt technologies in developed markets are the ones that hold the greatest potential in developing markets. According to Gartner, organizations will need to spend close to 3X for every investment made in digital to realize a continuous legacy application modernization.
It is important that organizations continue to invest in system innovation, which will help them add significant value to their business. This will also help them enhance their capabilities to deliver next-generation solutions to their customers. It is necessary that organizations identify legacy applications and analyze technologies being leveraged in critical processes.
Containerization in Legacy Application Modernization for Greater Innovation
For realizing greater operational excellence with digital innovation while mitigating overhead, organizations need to consider containerization in their legacy application modernization strategy. This helps them in versioning components of their legacy applications to benefit more from the cloud. Also, containerization enables portability, which enables organizations to rid the existing dependencies while moving their applications to the cloud.
Containerizing legacy applications demands resources that change the application code for leveraging base platform services. However, it provides high value, repeatability, and stability while allowing applications to benefit from cloud functionalities such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Although legacy application modernization can be a resource-intensive process, it allows you to decrease the time and resources spent managing these applications.
In their search for the right option, Organizations and technology leaders need to assess and resolve legacy challenges from the perspective of cost, risks, and impacts. They need to emphasize how modernization approaches improve these aspects. Therefore, during the analysis of legacy challenges and formulating approaches, organizations must evaluate technologies in context with evolving dynamics of the market.
To Sum UP
Legacy application portfolios have often been viewed as an issue and are subjected to rip-and-replace on a large scale. Organizations and technology leaders must focus on the management of their legacy application portfolio as an asset. They must resolve challenges and execute continuous business-driven modernization for realizing optimum value.