Business transformation is the key to success in the present competitive world. Moreover, the global economic unrest post-Covid-19 has flared the urgency to stay ahead in the market. In the current digital transformation wave, the one who can adapt to the rapid, unprecedented changes and scale simultaneously will eventually win the race. Adopting cloud computing is one of the critical ways to attain transformation. There are two ways of adopting the cloud platform- cloud migration or application modernization.
Either you can completely move the workloads, data, and other applications from an on-premise server to the cloud server or modernize the infrastructure, internal architecture, and features of existing legacy applications to make them cloud-ready.
This article explains how application modernization accelerates digital transformation.
Application Modernization: A Synopsis
According to Markets and Markets, the global application modernization market size will grow at a CAGR of 16.8% from USD 11.4 billion in 2020 to USD 24.8 billion by 2025. The primary factors that drive the market's growth are the rising focus on transforming legacy systems and the demand for advanced infrastructure to ensure business continuity. Application modernization is one of the primary ways to attain cloud-first digital transformation. It helps determine effective output value from an existing legacy application while enhancing the platform with advanced features and proficiencies.
However, before your company starts the modernization journey, it's crucial to evaluate whether the process is fruitful for your business. Further, knowing the limitations also helps optimally plan the modernization process and implement the best ways to modernize the applications.
Why Should Companies Consider App Modernization?
The urge for
digital transformation to stay aligned with the rapid market changes makes it mandatory for business leaders to discover effective methods for modernizing legacy applications.
“For several organizations, legacy systems hold back the business initiatives and processes that rely on them.”
Stefan Van Der Zijden, VP Analyst, Gartner
Application modernization enables an organization to control its expenses and enhance its digital footprint. Further, it helps to use modern infrastructure, features, languages, and other technologies. However, there can be several reasons justifying the need for the application modernization
strategy of an organization. Here is a list of the five most important reasons your company needs app modernization.
• Accelerates Digital Transformation: One of the key ways to achieve digital transformation is by modernizing your legacy apps. It is crucial to initiate
legacy application migration after evaluating them and finding the best strategy to make them cloud-ready.
• Future-Ready Applications: The following primary reason is digitally empowering your applications to leverage the benefits of advanced technology. Cloud app modernization helps you stay aligned with the changing market dynamics and enhance the overall performance and efficiency of the applications.
• Control Cost: Modernizing application impacts your organizations’ investment plans in the long run. Legacy applications require frequent maintenance and upgrades, which affects the productivity and overall performance of the system.
• Improves Business Opportunity: Modernizing your applications will enhance the reach and scope of your business. It enhances business processes and makes optimum utilization of your resources which, boosts revenue growth, reduces investments and, increases profit margin and ROI.
• Scalability: One of the critical challenges of legacy applications and infrastructure is the capacity to accommodate the demand and scale accordingly. As a result, it hampers the stability of an organization. If you plan to modernize your applications by moving them to the cloud, it is ideal as cloud app modernization guarantees improved scalability, mobility, and accessibility.
• Workforce Engagement: When your employees get a better user experience, it improves their productivity, brings innovations in operations, ensures quality output, and improves efficiency.
• Customer Experience: For every business, the customer is king! So, customer experience is critical to having a market presence. Modernized applications improve the customer experience by enabling new processes and upgrading services. As a result, businesses gain increased customer retention and more revenue through robust sales strategies.
Major Risk Factors That You Can’t Ignore
What is the biggest challenge faced by organizations attempting to initiate application modernization for their platform? The rapid enhancement caused by the multiple cloud and mobile technologies makes it difficult for IT leaders and programmers to pace up to the updates. As a result, it is vital to know your major risk factors before initiating the process. These factors might hinder companies from
beginning the modernization process. As a result, most organizations continue to use legacy applications.
Here are some of the listed challenges while carrying out a legacy app modernization process.
• Identifying the applications those you want to modernize is a tedious and cumbersome process for organizations.
• The collaboration of legacy & advanced systems
• Undesired operational issues during peak productive time
• Quality Assurance
• Temporary performance hassle and time lags
• The cost incurred and the bandwidth to implement the actual process.
• Training and upskilling the workforce to work on the modern applications
One of organizations' primary challenges is ensuring that their modernized applications run smoothly on their upgraded platform. As an entrepreneur, you must ensure that your upgraded platform has compatible features with your existing system formats. At the same time, you also need to consider the investment aspect after evaluating the cost to the company.
Best Ways to Modernize Applications
According to Accenture, the cloud monitoring industry will grow by 22.7% between 2020 and 2022. Three primary approaches might help enterprises scale up their legacy infrastructure to a cloud-native platform.
Go Serverless
Serverless computing enables your organization to initiate a seamless movement of your operational workloads, reducing the dependencies on a physical server. According to Markets and Markets reports, the serverless cloud computing market will rise by a 22.7% CAGR from 2021 to 2025. With serverless cloud computing technology, there is no need to have an infrastructure to build and run applications for businesses.
Since the last decade, this trend has evolved and gained importance. Further, it will be more definite in investment, effort optimization, responsiveness, and enhanced efficiency. As a result, you can develop and run applications more effectively without worrying about infrastructure management tasks. Additionally, going serverless allows leniency to scale and accommodate demand variations.
Consider Containerization
The
containers in cloud computing allow grouping the applications and all their components into a single, actionable and portable suite. The leading providers of containerization are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google, which offer orchestration tools and container services for creating and deploying containers. According to Forrester's 2020 Container Adoption Survey, almost 65% of business owners are either using or are affirmatively considering about using containers as part of their IT transformation approach. Containerization enhances the reliability and agility of the applications shifted between the computation platforms. In addition, it decreases the overhead costs, ensures operational consistency, and improves the efficiency of the applications.
Make Your Platform Cloud-Native
To make the business environment cloud-native, you need to implement the re-platforming approach that requires migrating applications to the cloud in their original form from the legacy infrastructure to the cloud, while modernizing some of the applications and enhancing their features to take
benefit of the cloud. Common alterations and upgrades include improving how applications fetch information from the back-end database. You can automate this process in the cloud environment to ensure efficient data utilization and operational efficiency.
How Did IBM Help Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) to Modernize their IT Platform?
A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study reveals that 62% of executives surveyed are about to pace up their digital transformation and cloud adoption plan over the next two years. As a result, the need to modernize complex legacy applications and workloads arises.
Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler, has collaborated with IBM to accelerate its digital transformation journey, improve operational efficiency, and utilize organizational data effectively. As a result, IBM shifted one-third of CCEP’s enterprise workloads from the legacy data center to IBM Cloud.
CCEP could witness strategic progression towards cloud-first digital transformation through IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture with Red Hat OpenShift. It helped CCEP modernize its IT environment. Further, IBM’s Multi-Cloud Management capability helped integrate and manage the legacy systems, private and public clouds, from a single dashboard.
The collaboration with IBM has helped CCEP begin a journey towards an open and secure cloud architecture driving a massive digital footprint.
Summing it Up
Application modernization is one integral method to move your organization towards digital transformation when the need for automation widens across business and IT operations. However, to achieve a successful automation strategy across the organization, your business should begin with some small and successful projects. Further, you can optimize and scale the activity for other processes and in other verticals of your organization.
“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next ten years if they don’t figure out how to modify their entire business to accommodate new technologies.”
John Chambers, former executive chairman, and CEO, Cisco
Frequently Asked Questions
What is App Modernization in the cloud?
Application modernization is enhancing legacy software with the latest computing methods that comprise advanced languages, frameworks, and infrastructure. As a result, the application takes full advantage of the unique platform, including efficiency, security, agility, and structural integrity.
What are the Benefits of Application Modernization?
Application modernization enhances an organization's digital footprint by regulating its investments and leveraging modern infrastructure, features, languages, and other technologies. Further, it improves the opportunities for the new business avenue by providing scalable solutions, effective workforce management, and efficient customer engagement.
What is AWS Cloud Modernization?
AWS application modernization plans entirely depend on your business requirements. You can either lift and shift, refactor or completely re-platform your applications, and make them ideal software for your organization. Further, modernizing your applications with AWS allows you to reduce costs, enhance efficiencies and optimize ROI.