What is Legacy Application Modernization?
Legacy application modernization is the process of upgrading existing applications. This involves updating older applications with newer and improved software.
People also refer to legacy application modernization as legacy system modernization. A legacy application or system is an older application that has served as a key part of the business for a while.
These applications use outdated technology and are now obsolete, incompatible with, or not optimized for modern operating systems or IT infrastructure. As a result, legacy application modernization services will upgrade these applications for the modern age.
Why is Legacy Application Modernization Important for Businesses?
As the digital world evolves, businesses need to find a way to keep up. Applications have been a successful way to stay connected to customers. However, technology is a rapidly changing landscape.
While legacy applications may have been useful when first implemented, they cannot compete with the rapidly evolving demands of digital transformation. Customers increasingly value efficiency, security, and the latest technology in applications.
A modern application must offer all this and more to satisfy the user experience of a new age of clients. The benefits of legacy application modernization will boost profits, improve business processes, and enhance your company’s image.
Some of the key benefits of the modernization process for businesses include:
- Enhanced Security: As cyber threats evolve, modern applications need to provide secure and reliable protection protocols. For application modernization, these include access control, regular data backups, and disaster recovery.
- Agile Innovation: As companies look toward legacy application modernization, they drastically accelerate their infrastructure and design. Using the latest tools and services will streamline development and innovation. Businesses can automatically update and enable the latest technologies.
- Robust Infrastructure: Updating applications improves efficiency and lays the groundwork for easy software development and enhancements.
- Cost-Efficiency: Taking a cloud-first approach to application modernization already decreases infrastructure expenditure costs. Modernizing your applications is also more cost-efficient than uprooting and replacing them entirely.
What are Legacy Application Modernization Services?
According to Gartner, application modernization services address the migration of legacy to new applications or platforms. This includes the integration of new functionality to provide the latest functions to the business.
These services improve existing applications by adding modern technologies. A few of these additions include:
- AI and Machine Learning. Artificial Intelligence has helped to offer deeper insight and automated services for modern applications, from facial recognition to social media algorithms to smart manufacturing systems. Chat GPT further broke barriers with its release as a large language model that seamlessly provides content.
- Cloud Compatibility. Everything is virtual in the modern age. Applications need to be able to adapt to these changes as well. Cloud-compatible and cloud-native applications can update seamlessly, automatically scale as needed, and reduce expenses.
- Containers. These packages of software bundle together application code, which enables seamless deployment across different environments.
- Microservices. You can decouple different components into smaller and more discrete pieces that you can independently deploy, update, and operate.
Infrastructure Needed for Legacy Application Modernization
Application modernization requires the use of specific platforms and tools. Cloud platforms offer multiple options to accelerate your application modernization initiative.
Cloud infrastructure ensures maximum scalability, storage, automation, security, and convenience when modernizing applications.
Sangfor’s aStor is ideal for improving processing and storage. The platform unifies the management of storage resources, intelligently allocates storage resources for different applications, and offers easy scalability to meet long-term data storage needs.
Making use of a data lake can help to sort and store your raw data. A data warehouse can also help to store archival data and sort information as needed.
Sangfor Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) also combines computing, storage, virtualization, and security. This ensures simple deployment, ease of management, and cutting-edge security.
The hybrid cloud also provides a perfect platform for application modernization. Hybrid cloud computing is a blend of both public and private cloud platforms. This means that it provides a unified and flexible computing model.
Legacy Application Modernization Approaches for Enterprises
Companies can use different approaches to modernize their applications. These include:
- Re-platforming: This involves moving your application from its current platform to a better one.
- Re-hosting: This strategy involves transferring the application without altering the code from its actual environment to a cloud platform.
- Recoding: This means rewriting the existing code of one or more parts of the application for it to better run in the current environment.
- Rearchitecting: This approach creates a new application architecture to improve performance and new capabilities.
- Re-engineering: This includes building applications in a new platform with better functions.
- Interoperability: This strategy utilizes the ability of applications to connect securely and automatically exchange data.
- Replacement: This includes replacing the current application with a modern, off-the-shelf solution.
How Sangfor Can Help Enterprises Achieve Legacy Application Modernization
Sangfor provides cloud services and platforms to improve your business' legacy application modernization project. Sangfor also offers a range of robust cybersecurity platforms to ensure superior protection from cyber threats. Click here to learn more about Sangfor’s cybersecurity and cloud computing solutions.
