Transforming your legacy applications to become more agile and efficient in the cloud.
Our modernization specialists help IT leaders strip out unnecessary operating costs—reducing capital spending and freeing staff—for new strategic and revenue-generating initiatives in the cloud.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is the practice of updating older software for newer computing approaches, including newer languages, frameworks and infrastructure platforms. This practice is also sometimes called legacy modernization or legacy application modernization. It is the software development equivalent of renovating an older home to take advantage of improvements to efficiency, safety, structural integrity and so forth. Rather than retiring an existing system or replacing it wholesale, legacy modernization extends the lifespan of an organization’s applications while also taking advantage of technical innovations
Why modernize legacy applications?
Application modernization enables an organization to protect its investments and refresh its software portfolio to take advantage of contemporary infrastructure, tools, languages and other technology progress. A robust application modernization strategy can reduce the resources required to run an application, increase the frequency and reliability of deployments, and improve uptime and resiliency, among other benefits. As a result, an application modernization plan is a common feature of an enterprise’s overall digital transformation strategy.
Key technologies for application modernization
There are several intersecting technologies fundamental to application modernization.
- Cloud Computing: When people discuss application modernization, they are typically referring to the process of migrating traditional applications to run in modern cloud environments. These include public cloud platforms, private clouds and hybrid clouds (which usually refer to public and/or private clouds integrated with on-premises environments.)
- Containers: Containers are a cloud-centric method for packaging, deploying and operating applications and workloads. The big-picture benefits associated with containerization include greater scalability, portability and operational efficiency that is well-suited for cloud infrastructure, and especially multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
- Microservices: This is not so much a technology as an architectural choice. Instead of building and operating an application as a single, complete codebase—usually called a monolith, or monolithic development—you decouple different components into smaller, discrete pieces that can be deployed, updated and operated independently.
- Orchestration and Automation: Orchestration in software development refers to the automation of many of the operational tasks associated with containers, including deployment, scaling and networking. Automation in general is an important principle and technology, as it is increasingly necessary to ensure that development, operations and security teams can sustainably manage their modern apps at scale.
Why do enterprises need application modernization?
Most enterprises have significant investments in their existing application portfolio, from both a financial and operational standpoint. While the term “legacy” sometimes has a negative connotation in software, in reality these legacy systems are often among a business’s most mission-critical applications.
Few companies are willing or able to simply retire these applications and start over; the costs, productivity losses and other issues are too great. Therefore, application modernization is the most sensible way for many enterprises to realize the advantage of newer software platforms, tools, architectures, libraries and frameworks.
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