Article summary:
Not sure which modernization strategy to choose for your application? This article explains in detail what is legacy application, how it can hamper your business and which strategy is a perfect fir for you.
Head of Database Migration Department, Ispirer Systems
Legacy applications often impede business development. An application developed using the latest technology 15 years ago may not meet modern requirements for performance, scalability, and integration with third-party services. Applications often cannot cope with peak loads, adding new features becomes increasingly difficult, and finding developers familiar with outdated technologies is even more difficult.
But we can assure you that all these difficulties can be resolved. In this article, we will explain how an outdated application negatively affects business, discuss modernization strategies, explain the difference between them, and discuss how automation tools can simplify your task. Let's not delay the introduction and begin.
What is a legacy application?
A legacy application is one that is written using outdated technology but is still critical for day-to-day operations. In other words, it is a living project with intricate code, weak architecture, or outdated technologies.
As a rule, the definition of a legacy application is based on the age of the application. However, a legacy application can be a system developed 15 years ago and only a 3-year-old application. The point is that a system becomes a legacy application when it no longer meets business requirements. Any application can be considered a legacy if it slows down processes or, on the contrary, hinders the adaptation, transformation, and development of the business.
An application developed decades ago does not necessarily acquire legacy status if it meets business requirements and copes with its tasks. On the other hand, an application built only a couple of years ago may unexpectedly block your business' ability to react to a change in the industry or market, creating a threat to its growth and viability.
How do legacy apps negatively impact business?
As your application ages, you may encounter several difficulties and risks associated with legacy applications.
- High maintenance and operational costs. The older the technology, the more challenging and costlier it is to find specialists. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, legacy COBOL systems couldn't handle the surge in demand, and updates were nearly impossible. Governments and organizations scrambled to find COBOL experts, even offering to train developers quickly. With few specialists available, many turned to contractors, paying up to 100$ per hour—or 500$ for rarer skills. This crisis made it clear that old technology requires higher costs.
- Security vulnerabilities. Legacy applications are vulnerable to security threats and often do not meet the current regulatory standards, creating significant risks for an organization.
- Compromised integrations. Older systems are challenging to integrate with new third-party applications, which limits their functionality.
- Difficulties with adding new features. Because of their structure and dependencies, outdated applications are difficult to modernize and add new features to.
- Complex maintenance. Maintaining older systems can become increasingly difficult as technology advances due to a lack of support and expertise.
Modernization strategies for legacy applications
If an application cannot meet business needs, it should be modernized. All the modernization strategies can be divided into two groups:
- Evolutionary strategy - gradually enhancing the architecture of the application and code quality.
- Revolutionary strategy - complete rehaul of the application, including refactoring or rewriting the code
What strategy to choose depends on your business needs and resources, including the time and money you are ready to spend on the application.
Top 8 Legacy Application Modernization Strategies
The first step in choosing a modernization method is to define a high-level plan for modernizing your application. Once you have defined the plan of action and understood the goals of modernization, you can begin choosing a strategy. Let's take a closer look at the top 8 modernization strategies.
- Application rehosting, or a "lift-and-shift," involves moving applications from a legacy to a newer platform. Most often, businesses opt for such an approach when moving from on-premises to a cloud. This approach provides immediate benefits such as improved infrastructure and scalability. Large companies often opt for this strategy as it allows them to improve the performance of their systems without disrupting existing workflow.
- Application replatforming. This approach implies moving the existing code to a newer platform. Experts may reshape the code, but retain its features, structures and functions. Such a modernization option may be costly and complex.
- Application reengineering. Reengineering is a review of processes to detect performance issues and improve application efficiency. It can also improve the functionality of a legacy app.
- Application refactoring. Refactoring means changing the structure of an application to improve its readability and ease of maintenance. It can also improve compatibility and add new functionality to a legacy application.
- Application rearchitecting. Rearchitecting is a modernization approach for complex, business-critical legacy applications where rehosting or refactoring is insufficient to meet evolving business needs. In such a case, companies have to make significant architectural changes to the core structure and design of the product.
- Reutilizing or encapsulation. Encapsulation means putting the application into new technology, like Docker containers. This is a low-cost strategy that allows the product to launch on a new platform and integrate it with modern APIs.
- Application retirement, also known as application decommissioning, is about shutting down outdated applications while retaining access to older data.
- Application rebuilding. This approach implies completely rebuilding the application and maintaining its original scope and specifications.
Sometimes application modernization can be not the best solution, as migration tends to be a more viable decision. Depending on the scope, complexity, the source technology, and business needs, migration can solve all the issues connected to performance, scalability, integration, security at once. Some may say: “But migration is a too long and too expensive process!”. Well, lucky you are to read this article, automation can do everything for you with your minimal participation. The market is full of tools that automate the application migration and save tons of your time and resources. CodeWays (prior nGLFly) - is one of them. It automates the migration of programming languages. In addition, the tool can change the architecture of the application, for example, from desktop to web-based.
Let's wrap it up
Legacy applications generally drag a company's efficiency down, hindering the organization's further development. Legacy modernization helps organizations improve efficiency and performance and reduce the costs of their legacy applications.
At Ispirer, we consider the specific business needs, create a detailed roadmap, and choose the modernization strategy that best suits you. Book a demo with our experts to discuss all the details of your future modernization project.
