Exploring the Benefits of Enterprise Application Modernization

Organizations must quickly adapt to new technological advances to stay relevant and competitive in the ever-changing business landscape. One of the ways for companies looking to transition from their legacy processes and systems to become more agile and efficient is to employ the enterprise application modernization strategy.

While processes and strategies can differ per the business model and requirements of companies, a well-thought-out enterprise application modernization strategy can open new opportunities, enhance operational efficiencies and drive innovation to drive businesses in the digital age. The goal of application modernization is to improve app functionality, increase scalability, reduce maintenance costs & improve security.

This blog will define enterprise application modernization and showcase its benefits.

What is Enterprise Application Modernization?

The process of enterprise application modernization revolves around updating legacy applications to address the dynamically changing business needs with next-generation technologies. It's a step toward achieving digital transformation and involves processes like cloud migration and the upgradation of legacy systems. It is a gradual process that enables companies to transition from legacy applications to modernizing their platform infrastructure, internal architecture & other features. It involves migrating applications and data to the new platform, integrating applications with other systems and technologies, and modernizing the application infrastructure.

Did You Know?

• As per a press release from Gartner, cloud spending can exceed traditional IT spending by 2025, and approximately 51% of the spending will be on the cloud compared to 41% in 2022.
• Gartner also suggests that more than US$ 1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake because of the shift to the cloud and is expected to increase to US$ 1.8 trillion by 2025.

Benefits of Enterprise Application Modernization

• Increases Productivity: Using outdated and ineffective systems to run legacy applications can be expensive and time-consuming. Glitches in legacy applications can lead to increased spending and excess resource utilization.

Modernizing applications helps integrate different aspects of the development process into one unified ecosystem. This enables work on multiple tasks, reducing time to bring products to the market. Advanced features and tools of modernized applications help simplify operations without extensive training and lead to efficiency and productivity.

• Reduces Operational Costs: Maintaining legacy applications hosted on-premises data centers makes them expensive. These legacy applications often lack adequate documentation. Implementing new features is a challenging task, and they accrue sizable technical debt.

In contrast, technology infrastructure modernization helps companies leverage cloud capabilities to meet emerging digital business requirements. Cloud technology eliminates the need for a separate data center by offering a pay-as-you-go model. Implementation of DevOps also helps improve operations significantly while reducing costs through optimizing CI/CD pipelines.

• Performance: Over time, it becomes difficult to support legacy systems and applications, and it causes difficulties for the operations team to keep these running, leading to performance issues, increased resource consumption, and frequent crashes and failures. Such cases can weaken the competitive advantage of companies. Application modernization can enable businesses to use digital technologies like AI, ML, Big data, and cloud services. Modernization can help companies to develop a more flexible platform for innovation by adopting the best and most relevant IT ecosystem. It can also help integrate features and functionalities to increase uptime.

• Compliance: Legacy systems and applications may not meet the most recent compliance standards. Compliance and regulatory issues usually lead to fines, penalties, and even security breaches. Modernization enables compatibility with current platforms and devices.

• Support And Security: Since updating, maintaining, or supporting legacy systems and applications is almost impossible, these systems must depend on outdated security measures or patches. Such methods or applications are prone to security breaches. Modernization helps ensure that security and support updates are available across systems consistently and regularly, increasing data security and the fight against new threats.

• Remove Data Silos: Data silos are data storages that can be shared within the organization. Many legacy systems or applications may not be able to integrate with new software, making It difficult to access the data stored in such legacy systems. Enterprise application modernization also leads to increased data access across organizations.

• Enhanced Customer Experience: Outdated applications and systems are slow and cannot help provide a best-in-class customer experience. Modernizing legacy applications can enable businesses to utilize cloud environments and current technological upgrades.

Conclusion

Modernizing legacy applications is not as straightforward as it sounds and requires time, effort, and money. It involves discovery, design, and implementation phases. But the result enables businesses to offer customers better services, security, reliability, and efficiency. Modernization can accelerate business growth and become competitive.

The key to successful application modernization is a strategy and prioritizing applications for modernization that can benefit from cloud speed, performance, features etc. Companies can use modernization skills and tools to drive innovation by connecting with an enterprise application modernization software service.