In our recent Digital Transformation blog, we considered three essential components of a digital transformation, the first being legacy application modernization. Legacy application modernization is the process of upgrading or improving your existing platform with the help of modern technology that will enable future digital goals. It enhances the strengths of your existing applications with the very latest cloud software technology, taking your business to a whole new level. Actionable business insights are unlocked, development and deployment is accelerated, and end-user experience is enriched.
When you consider your existing legacy applications, replacement is not always necessary, and often not possible. You may have many applications, each one doing its own job and doing it pretty well. However, over time, and as the software becomes outdated, they are harder to maintain with an increasing lack of data integration between systems.
For many organizations, the modernization ‘trigger’ is to overcome those various challenges being faced with legacy systems and data.
- The Challenge with Legacy Systems
- Different code bases: different legacy systems, written in different languages at different times, that have gradually been merged.
- Lack of interoperability: the legacy systems may lack the ability to exchange and make use of information between them.
- Monolithic architecture: an IT infrastructure that has become costly to support, less efficient, from a speed and storage perspective, and generally a challenge to manage.
- The Challenge with Legacy Data
- Distributed and disconnected: various data is siloed across different databases, in different structures, without the ability to acquire business intelligence.
- Large and hard to move, which raises concerns around data security compliance or industry-specific regulations.
- Old and unsupported file formats: valuable data becomes less and less accessible as technology and software rapidly supersedes previous formats.
- The Challenge with Legacy Hosting
A key challenge with legacy hosting is the limitation on delivering applications and new features quickly and when needed. However, modern tools are now commonplace in the cloud environment, such as continuous integration or continuous development tools. Organizations that have already modernized may be pushing out new features and fixes multiple times a day, whereas with a legacy system you may be constrained to bi-weekly or, even worse, monthly release cycles. Very often when organizations digitally transform, they are blown away by the speed at which they can now take action, make changes, or deliver features, as and when new business needs arise.
Approaching Legacy App Modernization
Legacy application modernization is so much more than a software update or a move to the cloud: it’s about bringing your entire enterprise up to speed with the digital environment. Depending on the number of existing legacy applications, or the number of features that need to change, there are many different approaches to application modernization. Here at SourceFuse, we have defined the most successful ‘best-practice’ framework that goes about modernization in a logical method:
- Cloud-native computing: you can have data sitting wherever it needs to, whether that’s a public cloud, (AWS, Azure or Google), a private cloud server, or a hybrid cloud structure. A modern and dynamic cloud architecture delivers speed, flexibility, scalability, continuous delivery and integration.
- API-first model: thinking about the structure of the system interactions first. This starts with designing, planning and testing integrations, to ensure it meets the business logic, rather than starting with coding. This process enables faster integration between systems, decouples functionalities and frees up any system constraints.
- Containerization: the process of packaging up the entire computing environment, so that it can be easily deployed in any other computing location. For example, a developer’s local device, another particular cloud or testing environment, etc. This enables an easy yet consistent and scalable way to implement applications across many environments.
- Microservices architecture: the process of ‘breaking down’ a single monolithic structure into a suite of small services. Each microservice runs its own processes, making the application much more manageable to maintain. Development cycles are significantly shortened, the user interface is more stable, and the ability to add additional microservices or improvements, without impacting the entire application, makes it highly scalable.
Legacy Application Modernization with SourceFuse
When it comes to digital modernization and legacy application modernization, SourceFuse creates a memorable, personalized and deeply engaging experience for customers and employees. We believe that digital transformation is about changing how teams work together, not just what technology they are using to get the work done.
By transforming legacy technology with modern language, protocols, platforms, and the latest in cloud infrastructure innovations, we ensure your legacy data remains secure in its final destination, uphold industry-specific regulatory compliance, while reducing total cost of ownership. When legacy data is brought out of the silos and made open and accessible, suddenly, business insights are revealed that can drive and support your long-term strategic decisions for growth.
One such SourceFuse customer, who underwent legacy app modernization, achieved:
- 99.99% increase in availability
- 35% reduction in server costs
- 93% increase in performance efficiency
And with another SourceFuse customer, RateGain, they were able to achieve:
- 99.99% increase in availability
- Improved fault tolerance
- Increased scalability and cost reductions
Watch the RateGain webinar here, to discover their migration and modernization journey with SourceFuse.
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