App Modernization 101: How This Process Advances Your Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has become an essential step for businesses looking to advance in their industry and remain competitive. For the many businesses who are considering or have already started their migration to the cloud, the journey doesn’t stop there. The next phase, the app modernization process, is where the true benefits of digital transformation lie.

Businesses that are still relying on legacy applications are going to run into numerous pain points and security implications. These legacy applications are production applications that are not yet leveraging modern DevOps and cloud technology. Without application modernization, legacy applications are unable to fully embrace the benefits of modern digital technologies.

In this blog, we’ll further explain what application modernization is, along with its impact and various benefits.

What is Application Modernization?

App modernization is the conversion, rewriting, or porting of a legacy application system to a modern computing programming language, architecture, software library, protocol, or hardware platform.

This process protects an organization’s investments in their technology and refreshes their software portfolio. This in turn allows them to take advantage of modern infrastructure, tools, languages, and more. Further, this process helps to resolve the potential security risks related to legacy applications.

The Benefits of Application Modernization

Whether your business is pursuing an opportunity to bring new features to the market first, migrate an internal on-premises app to the cloud, or is looking to reduce cloud spend, the app modernization process provides several key benefits, including:

  1. Increased Developer Productivity through Operational Automation and Standardization

There’s no question that technological advancements bring about increased efficiency, functionality, and flexibility. Your tech should be working harder for you. Operational automation allows your applications to manage key processes without the need for human intervention. This significantly frees up developer time to focus their efforts elsewhere.

Following the app modernization process, your team should expect an overall enhanced experience in:

  • Planning: Define and track tasks with automated boards and manage backloads with custom dashboards
  • Developing: Automatically peer review code and automate deployment to Dev/QA/Production
  • Delivering: Leverage containers to automate version control of production applications, normalize delivery pipelines to manage user feedback, production deployments, and QA testing
  • Operating: Automate monitoring, security, and compliance through AI-based cloud security tools and normalized infrastructure deployment through IaC

The app modernization process improves efficiency overall. Expect faster time to market, the development of new, bigger application features, and the ability to run mission-critical applications on a future-ready platform.

2. Support and Maintenance

Maintaining legacy software comes with many headaches. Once outdated, legacy software can accumulate bugs, become incompatible with new technologies, and rely on old code that’s more cumbersome and costly to maintain.

Following the app modernization process, users can expect:

  • Shorter timeframes for DevOps teams to rapidly create and version infrastructure in the same method as their source code through Infrastructure as a Code
  • More granular control through versioning and increased reliability of each deployment through automation of versioning
  • The ability for DevOps to set a desired state for modern applications by leveraging containerization and orchestration

Finally, it can be difficult to find someone who can work on a legacy system. It might be necessary to train developers to provide support and maintenance as they’re generally working on the most current forms of software available.

3. Reduction in Costs

Overall, the application modernization process protects your business’s investment in your applications, increases revenue, and therefore improves profitability.

It’s important to note that the larger your footprint in the cloud, the larger your cost savings will be. If you already have a sophisticated set up within the cloud, your cost savings could be even higher.

On average, the mid-market cost savings of application modernization total:

  • 25% to 80% reduction in virtual application server costs
  • 50% to 75% reduction in production time for new features
  • 75% reduction in production incidents
  • 80% reduction in IT admin time for apps on Azure

The application modernization process protects the future of your business’s applications.

Technology is the structure that holds a business together. Without the right flexible technology in place, it’s impossible to maintain a competitive edge against others in your industry.

Next Steps: Begin Leveraging Modern Application Technology

A company’s technology is an enormous investment. But what good is that investment if your applications have an expiration date?

In a rapidly changing world, your applications need to be flexible, extensible, and easier to administer. Otherwise, those investments in your legacy applications will become obsolete.

Following your migration to the cloud, it’s time to start taking advantage of the modern capabilities of technology. Through the modernization process, your migration to the cloud will start paying off. In short, application modernization saves businesses both time and money, making it no surprise that this industry is expected to double to over $16 billion by 2025.

To learn more about the application modernization process, check out Arraya’s 5-part Application Modernization virtual series on-demand. These sessions outline the steps and strategy for a successful app modernization journey – one that will allow your organization to truly realize the benefits of digital transformation.

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now. 

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Arraya Insights