The Essential Guide to Types of Legacy Application Modernization

Published Date

Guide to legacy application modernization

Who decides when software systems are obsolete? While no business is immune from aging systems, replacing them according to new technology trends is too expensive and not something companies want to do. It’s worth highlighting that as long as business systems perform the functions they are meant to do, there is no need to “replace” systems. This is particularly true if replacing a legacy system would not bring in identifiable gains. However, there are clear cases when an upgrade or replacement is pretty evident. This could be either because maintaining the existing tech is difficult or because new functionality is needed that cannot be supported by existing tech systems.

The different types of application modernization to consider

As organizations embrace digital transformation strategies, different parts of existing systems can be upgraded rather than going for a time-consuming complete replacement. Application modernization can be of 3 types and will depend on the business goals , lag in the current application as well as data platforms.

Three types of application modernization

Frontend first approach to app modernization

If your legacy system has been around for a decade or more, there might be sweeping changes that you would ideally want. Though it is easy to write it down as the goal, it is hard to implement especially when the existing codebase is no longer supported new ways to bring in new functionality have to be evaluated. There are 5 red flags to look out for that says it is time to engineer your system, have a look at an earlier article.

So where do you start when modernizing applications? Sometimes it can be as simple changing the UI and bringing in more functional components of the frontend application. iTech India in our legacy application modernization services have worked with clients who want to keep risk as low as possible. In such instances, a variation of the strangler pattern works best. Picture this, painting one picket of a fence at a time, is going the slow and steady way but in a fairly short time, the picket fence will be newly painted. Starting by modernizing frontend applications