The IT landscape is beyond recognition, especially after the digital revolution. Businesses have shifted to modern operations and technology. Necessity is the mother of invention, and therefore, adopting modern technology is the need of the modern world for business growth and success. But even in today’s time, some companies are still using ancient, outdated, and monolithic legacy applications. They do not realize the importance of application modernization for surviving the challenges of the post-digital era. Or they are hesitant to change. Constant reliance on monolithic legacy systems has presented companies with functional and competitive challenges.  

What most organizations forget is that all systems are prone to failure eventually, especially old and outdated technology. It has a higher probability and scope of failure in flexibility and agility required for sustaining the digital pressures. There is an imperative need to create composite and modernized applications. Often businesses working with legacy applications are in it for quite a long time. It seems hard to them to switch to the cloud environment. Switching to the Cloud is not as easy as a simple copy and paste to a new infrastructure. For long-term viability and efficient execution, infrastructure modernization needs to come through a proper evolutionary process. A solid roadmap or modernization strategy has to be in place to leverage the full capabilities of the Cloud. To sustain, survive, grow, and adapt to the changing cloud requirements of the present era, one must understand the significance of software modernization first.  

Why Should a Business Modernize its legacy Applications? 

The following numbers speak for themselves about why application modernization is needed today.  

  • Modernized and up-to-date infrastructure you use contributes to 15-35% of year-over-year savings. 
  • Modernization results in 30-50% lower maintenance, support, and running costs. 
  • There is 74% less cost of hardware, software, staff, and resources with modern applications. 
  • Application operational efficiency is increased by 10%.  
  • A large organization or enterprise can expect a $1 billion increase in its annual revenue, accounting for almost a 14% boost per year.  

Some other arguments supporting the idea of application modernization include the following: 

Legacy Applications do not have Built-in Support for Cloud 

The biggest downside of a monolithic legacy system or outdated technology is that it does not have natural sync and performance capability for a cloud. It can survive the cloud culture but to a limited extent. Moreover, it fails beyond a certain limit because it has built-in capability for deployment and optimal functioning in on-premise infrastructure only. Running these applications in the Cloud will probably run them out of their natural capacity and result in time and cost management issues. This will eventually lead to decreased performance and more issues than solutions to the existing problems.   

Refactorization Brings Enhanced Functionality 

Restructuring, refactoring and remodeling your applications can lead to greater functionality with high performance at a low rate. Working with existing legacy applications can drive the system to failure and make your employees frustrated. The cost of legacy applications increases because they depend highly on third-party applications for sustainability and additional support that legacy apps are otherwise incapable of. Refactorizing your infrastructure will help organizations leverage new capabilities, functions, and features that do not require assistance and dependence on third-party applications. Application modernization enhances functionality, and the way employees utilize the new software and respond to change. There is a whole change of culture with software modernization.  

Staying Relevant 

Organizations established decades ago strive to stay relevant to modern trends and practices if they want to continue growing. Application modernization allows enterprises to stay relevant to modern technology and practices and make the most of it to transform their IT ecosystem. They are learning about AI, machine learning solution, deep learning, big data, Cloud, Azure, etc. staying relevant is the key to future innovation and performance. Having flexible foundations is just not enough. Businesses need to make an effort to stay up-to-date with recent happenings around the IT world.  

Conclusion   

Updating legacy applications leads to a developer’s productivity boost by up to 40%. The time to market increases and increases the system security. Every company, whether small or big, new or old, aims for good security. Legacy systems are incompatible and non-compliant with modern security protocols. The list of benefits and reasons for modernizing applications goes on. One needs to realize that sooner or later, old technology will become obsolete, and there will be no option other than upgrading your systems.