Application Modernization Explained

Modernizing applications is the process of taking existing legacy apps and updating their platform infrastructure, internal architecture, and/or features to a more modern approach; conversations about application modernization today are focused on bringing monolithic, on-premises applications into cloud architecture and release patterns.

When you leverage legacy modernization, you can take advantage of the benefits of the cloud, such as faster speed to market, scalability, agility, and lower costs. When you update your application, you can release new features in a timely manner, give other services access to your old features, and move the application from physical servers to the cloud in order to increase performance. 

Today, keeping up with the latest technology is crucial for all businesses. Updates and bug fixes can be rolled out in real-time to keep your application running smoothly. Keeping your software up-to-date is essential to simplifying operations and easing the burden on IT. IT companies that still rely on outdated, more expensive legacy apps often have difficulties such as incompatibility issues, high maintenance costs, and a scarcity of developers. This is holding companies back from moving fast and efficiently.

Why Doing It Effectively Is Important

The key to success in application modernization is strategy. Businesses should examine each potential modernization project and consider the benefits of cloud, speed, performance, and other features. Cloud-based development is great for shortening the development cycle and creating a modern customer experience and ROI. 

Moving your application from on-premises to the cloud can be a big undertaking. One of the challenges is cost and complexity. While this is a big shift, updating legacy standards could boost developers’ productivity by up to 40%. Modernizing applications and facilitating access to better developer services can help make engineering teams more productive and enhance time-to-market. 

In today's fast-changing world, IT environments must be flexible and innovative. App modernization is a way to do this. It enables organizations to capitalize on digital technology, including AI, machine learning, big data, and the cloud. 

Application modernization also helps with security. In recent surveys, it was found that legacy applications make businesses vulnerable to security threats. It's because these archaic programs are not compatible with high-quality security standards and modern authentication methods. As a result, today's businesses are more prone to hackers. If you want to stop these security risks, the best way to do this is to upgrade your applications to take advantage of the latest security standards.

Migrate & Modernize Apps Safely

There are many ways to approach legacy application modernization, but all come with their own benefits and difficulties. One of the best and safest ways to migrate and modernize apps safely is with feature flags. 

Moving or changing databases is no small task, and it can often be really risky. One of the most common misconceptions is that feature flags are only useful for new features, or for cosmetic changes. It turns out they can be really helpful in less risky situations too, such as moving or changing databases. They make it easier to test it with real, live data (for a subset of your user base), and much easier to roll it back if something goes wrong.  

Database migrations are intimidating, but also necessary. This process of using feature flags for migrations has been done many times by other companies, and for the most part, it goes rather smoothly. After all, who wants to have an unsafe migration? Feature flags can be used to confidently run database migrations while not impacting any customers.

Have More Control With Granular Targeting & Gradual Releases

When you're upgrading a legacy system to a cloud-based one, a powerful capability with feature flags is the ability to toggle features on and off. This enables you to route traffic, requests, and data between old and new systems seamlessly. You can also create targeting rules that allow you to deploy new infrastructure with extreme precision. 

There are multiple ways to migrate workloads to the cloud. For example, you can execute iterative migration of small batches of your application at a time with feature flags. You can also allow databases, micro-services, and containerized apps on the cloud for only a subset of users. 

Modernization improves user satisfaction. It's really hard to use outdated apps. A user interface with leading-edge functionalities and innovative features will make your company more efficient and your customers happier.