Checklist For Modernizing Your Legacy Application

1. Checklist For Modernizing Your Legacy Application The increase in competition in the market has caused several companies to gain considerable progress in their digital projects. Every company in the market tries to incorporate the newest and cutting-edge technology to stand out and gain more goodwill. With ever-changing trends in the market, the existing legacy application can become a bottleneck in a company’s growth. Therefore, modernizing legacy applications is vital in a company’s digital transformation journey. Legacy Application Modernization is the practice of upgrading, updating, or improving the existing legacy application. Those legacy applications that cannot meet the current business needs become obsolete. It is a crucial part of an organization’s overall digital transformation strategy. Why should you modernize your legacy application? As everyone knows, the environment in the IT landscape is super dynamic; every new year brings in a more recent version of the existing applications. New technologies keep rolling every time, making the existing ones obsolete. Some of the common challenges faced by legacy applications are that these applications receive no support from the developers. Obsoleteness of the existing legacy applications leads to incompatibility with the new technologies. Legacy applications are generally built as indivisible units, making upgrading them challenging. It becomes difficult to find specialists to operate them. These applications eventually start incurring high maintenance costs. There may be security vulnerabilities arising frequently. These challenges become a massive roadblock in the path of progress of the business. It is essential to modernize your legacy applications to overcome these obstacles and keep pace with the competitors. What can be the different approaches to modernize your legacy application? There are several approaches to modernizing your legacy applications with new technologies. Some of them are as follows:  Rebuilding – According to this approach, the codes of the existing application should be rewritten from scratch without changing its scope. Using this approach, the companies can identify the current application’s components that need modernization and rewrite only those codes. This eliminates the need of rewriting the entire application from scratch.

2.  Rearchitecting – This approach focuses on updating the existing application instead of making a new one. It involves optimizing or altering the current codes to improve performance and meet business needs.  Rehosting – This approach is known as “lift and shift” or “re-platforming.” It involves shifting the components of the existing application to a new cloud or hardware. Substantial code changes are subject to compatibility between the details of the current application and the host platform.  Replacing – This approach is about relinquishing the existing application and replacing it with a newer solution. It can be costly compared to the other three methods. However, this can be used if the rest of the approaches cannot satisfy the business needs. What benefits do you harvest by modernizing your legacy application? Modernizing your legacy application can help you overcome hurdles like incompatibility with new technologies, high maintenance costs, and many more. Some of the benefits of the Legacy Modernization Services are as follows:  Improved security – The legacy application may contain security issues because it was developed using older security practices. Hackers could access a company’s network or confidential data by exploiting security issues. Data leakage may be prevented to a greater extent with the modern security system. The recent applications keep getting security updates and bug fixes. This helps avoid threats and guards the company’s confidentiality. Therefore, modernizing your legacy application is essential to maintain and enhance data security.  Cost reduction – Maintaining the existing legacy application can be way costlier than getting a modernized version. According to the U.S. Government’s Accountability report, the legacy system of the federal government runs on obsolete programming languages like COBOL. This costs the legacy system about $337 million annually. Besides, legacy applications are generally hosted in in-house data centres, making them costly to maintain. On the contrary, leveraging cloud services helps a business to cut down the total costs by up to 50%. Hiring specialists to operate the existing legacy application becomes very costly because the new

3. developers do not learn ancient programming languages, and the older personnel become rare.  Increased productivity – The older legacy applications have compatibility issues with the latest hardware or modern solutions. As a result, the employees face errors, lags, and bugs which cause unnecessary delays in their work because they do not get reliable support from the developer. Modernizing your legacy application can help a business achieve smooth workflow and escape the delays caused by the older version of the application. What are the new trends in legacy application modernization? The primary objective of application modernization is to enhance and overhaul business operations. This helps make them smoother, faster, and more manageable. Some of the key recent trends in legacy application modernization include:  Containers – New business needs demand working in multiple environments. Hence, they need an application that is not limited to a fixed environment. Containerization helps the business operate in different domains. It also allows businesses to explore things like cloud infrastructures and in-house platforms. Overall, it leads to smooth, consistent, and efficient business operations across multiple platforms.  Cloud Migration – This modern practice is among the most sought-after methods in contemporary business. There are three cloud service categories: hybrid, private, or public. A company can use any of the three categories to upgrade its applications at a lower cost than in-house infrastructures.  Microservices – This type of architecture includes leniently coupled services instead of a monolithic structure. It helps companies deploy different application components without depending on each other. Therefore, business operations are simpler to maintain and upgrade. Conclusion Digital transformation is the future of business operations. It will reshape the global economy and make business operations easier and smoother. Modernization of legacy applications is indeed a labor-intensive, complex, and risky process. Yet, the results of modernization are well worth the risk. Businesses need to continually evolve to keep up with competitors and meet the demands of the ever-changing market. Organizations need to cease relying on obsolete software and start modernizing their core technologies. Companies that embrace modernization are the ones most likely to flourish.

4. ImpactQA is among the leading Legacy Modernization Companies and has QA consulting, software testing, and product development expertise. They have a dedicated team of highly skilled experts who work to manage your requirements. ImpactQA has a global presence and caters to multiple industries. They have helped companies adjust smoothly in their digital transformation journey. Proficient at the latest Services Legacy Application trends, they can tailor them according to the client and deliver the best user experience.