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Technologies that were groundbreaking a decade ago have become quite outdated, and the same will happen to the latest tools that we use today. With better and newer technologies entering the market every year, the risk of running a legacy system becomes more imminent. If you’ve noticed that your software solutions are costing you increasingly more money to maintain while performance is gradually falling, it may be time to consider legacy application modernization strategies.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the legacy app modernization process, types of migrations, and the benefits it can generate. Lastly, we’ll also investigate a step-by-step guide to modernizing legacy applications.
Before we dive into the legacy application modernization process, let’s begin by defining what legacy systems entail. Legacy applications refer to outdated systems that were built using older tools. Hence, they’ve become out-of-date and incompatible with modern technology, technical standards, and best practices. Legacy systems are also prone to security vulnerabilities, subpar performance, and limited scalability.
Legacy app modernization is the process of transforming outdated systems into contemporary tools with better compatibility, adaptability, and security. Through various legacy application modernization strategies, businesses can commit minor or major changes to the system to bring their old apps into the 21st century.
However, modernizing legacy applications is usually part of a broader digital transformation journey that enhances and streamlines business processes using modern technology. Legacy modernization is the first step, followed by system integration, introduction of new tools, migration to the cloud, and more. The main goal is to boost the company’s ability to compete in the market while optimizing performance, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.
Before we get into how to modernize your legacy applications, let’s identify the telltale signs of running legacy software.
Technical debt impies future costs of additional work that comes up when organizations choose a quick temporary solution as opposed to a more comprehensive approach. Similarly to financial debt, it slowly accumulates over time until the business finally tackles it. What starts as a few trade-offs that prioritize short-term gains over long-term quality can result in a fragile codebase that is expensive to maintain. Moreover, technical debt hinders the implementation of modern principles like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines alongside automated deployment practices, sending the application even further away from modern tools.
If your existing systems have security vulnerabilities that pose a threat to the safety of your data, it may be time to modernize legacy applications. While contemporary apps can be patched and updated without any profound changes, legacy systems can’t due to architectural and technological limitations. Especially if the outdated system is no longer compliant with privacy laws and regulations like GDPR, it becomes a considerable liability risk that has to be dealt with.
An integral part of digital transformation is leveraging modern data analytics capabilities that enable companies to evolve. The dependency on legacy systems that were built before data collection and analysis became possible makes it difficult to create new functionality. Since older apps were developed with monolithic architecture, they don’t offer the scalability and interoperability that the modern digital landscape demands.
The ever-changing markets force businesses to continuously adjust and innovate to ward off competition. Without the ability to gather data, streamline your operations, and alter business requirements, companies stagnate and lose growth opportunities. When your legacy systems cannot be integrated with modern tools and cannot accommodate new market demands, modernizing legacy applications becomes the best solution.
Legacy tools were created on outdated technologies, including programming languages, frameworks, and architectures. These obsolete tech stack components aren’t as flexible as modern technologies, making system updating exceptionally difficult and sometimes impossible. On top of that, the new generation of software engineers doesn’t learn the outdated tools, further hampering long-term maintainability.
The persistent reliance on legacy apps leads to a gradual accumulation of additional operational costs. Not only are businesses losing potential opportunities for growth and expansion, they’re also in need of specialists familiar with these legacy systems as the outdated technology often suffers from a shortage of critical personnel.
Finally, legacy app modernization is necessary when you lose vendor support. Aside from the lack of updates and security patches, lack of provider support means that you have nowhere to turn to when something goes wrong. This makes solving routine issues more complex and costly, further impeding the company’s performance and business growth.
If you can recognize your own existing systems in the previous section, it’s time to invest in legacy app modernization. Depending on your business goals and the condition of legacy software, you may opt for an evolutionary modernization strategy or a revolutionary one. In the evolutionary approach, the change occurs gradually, while revolutionary modernization efforts imply a complete code rewriting or rearchitecting. In this section, we’ll explore the types of legacy application modernization strategies in greater detail.
The simplest and most straightforward type of legacy app modernization, rehosting is the process of moving the applications to another hosting environment, in particular, the cloud environment. Rehosting, also known as Lift and Shift, implies few to no changes to the code and minimal disruption to the business. This type of modernization can enable better scalability and reduced costs, but it doesn’t solve the technical debt and architectural concerns.
When to choose:
Rehosting is an ideal solution for companies looking to swiftly relocate their well-functioning applications to a new infrastructure. If your system performance is stable and the app covers the current business requirements, rehosting is a perfect non-invasive way to migrate.
For example, a healthcare organization can rely on Lift and Shift to move their electronic patient records to the cloud to meet new industry practices while preserving the established business processes.
Another evolutionary legacy systems modernization strategy is replatforming, a process that requires limited modifications to the app. Although replatforming demands more effort than rehosting, it’s still considered a mild cloud migration approach. With no changes to the core architecture, this type of legacy application modernization process helps with scalability, security, and compatibility issues.
Replatforming is a suitable strategy for organizations that want moderate performance improvements without alterations to the architecture. If the underlying application is sound but requires enhanced security and cost strategy, replatforming is the perfect way to eliminate the hurdles of running on an obsolete platform.
For example, a shipping company that migrates its tracking legacy software to Kubernetes could take advantage of the cloud technologies without rewriting the app core.
Refactoring is a slightly more laborious task, requiring substantial changes to the code. This modernization process can involve removing duplicates and redundancies, enhancing code readability, and alignment with current standards of programming and cybersecurity. However, refactoring is used to optimize performance, not change the way an application functions and behaves.
For example, the Strangler Fig Pattern is a type of factoring that offers a slower and more gradual transition. It works by gradually introducing new systems to eventually “strangle” and replace the original. In other words, a microservices structure slowly pushes away the monolithic architecture to modernize the application incrementally.
If the underlying architecture is suitable but the application code leads to performance bottlenecks, refactoring is a great approach. This legacy application modernization strategy will aid you in addressing technical debt, enhancing code maintainability, and drastically improving performance.
For instance, refactoring can be used by an insurance company to reduce code complexity and remove duplicates, thus speeding up claim processing time.
Encapsulation, or reutilizing, is another type of evolutionary modernization involving the repackaging of legacy software with APIs and middleware to enable seamless integration with other systems. If the application is stable and functional, you can preserve it while expanding the accessibility and UI/UX.
Encapsulation is used to protect critical legacy software while broadening the accessibility and extending integration capabilities. If complete revamping is too costly or the system is critical to business objectives, reutilizing will help you accomplish modernization with limited time and budget.
This strategy can be helpful in the banking sphere where important systems contain valuable and sensitive data. Instead of rewriting the whole app, a financial company can encapsulate it with APIs to facilitate integration with modern banking apps.
Rearchitecting is a type of legacy systems modernization strategy that combines code refactoring with architecture redesign. Suitable for more complex and essential legacy systems, rearchitecting requires the reimagining of the entire apps from the ground up. Often used in monolithic apps, this approach allows businesses to leverage microservice architecture and cloud services, improving scalability, code maintainability, and app performance.
Rearchitecting is a perfect choice for legacy software that was built on inflexible monolithic architecture that hampers the business’s growth. If you need to unlock scalability and integrate with modern systems, rearchitecting may be the best solution.
A good example of rearchitecting in action is a retailer whose systems become overloaded during traffic spikes. By breaking it down into microservices, a retailer can scale different services like inventory and payment separately to avoid downtime.
A more radical approach, rebuilding is the process of redesigning the entire application while preserving the original specifications. Rebuilding can also be done incrementally, starting with critical components and moving to other parts of the legacy system. Although the process is quite complex and lengthy, it addresses technical debt, improves flexibility and scalability, and bolsters security.
Application rebuilding is a fitting solution for companies whose existing software is severely outdated and whose business requirements have changed. If your systems perform poorly, your user experience suffers from legacy user interfaces, and your tech stack is so old that you can no longer find qualified developers, this strategy might be perfect for you.
For instance, a utility firm can rebuild the entire IT infrastructure to accommodate modern terminals with self-service portals and mobile devices. The company can modernize their solution with the latest technological advancements while keeping the same core functionality.
When no amount of technical prowess can save your existing code and system, it may be time to consider replacing the entire app. Also known as repurchasing, this type of application modernization is the most straightforward strategy. The only important factor is to identify a new application that offers the same or similar functionality and meets your requirements, which requires a comprehensive assessment. The replacement usually occurs using either Software as a Service (SaaS) or Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS).
If your expenses are getting hard to manage and the application provides zero to little competitive edge, replacing might be the optimal solution. Especially if short time to market is crucial, simply purchasing the right tool that aligns with your business operations and goals is a great option.
Good use cases of the replacing strategy are generic business scenarios like accounting and human resources. Replacing is a perfect approach for tools that don’t deliver any business value but rather facilitate common business processes such as CRM systems.
Finally, the most radical modernization approach is redeveloping the entire application from scratch. Although costly and time-consuming, it allows you to create a custom solution that perfectly aligns with your business needs. The upside is the complete freedom in choosing tech stacks, platforms, features, and other technical aspects, enabling businesses to develop application architecture that offers the greatest competitive advantages.
Rewriting of the entire software application is a suitable approach for companies whose business needs cannot be fully covered by market alternatives. Additionally, redeveloping is an application modernization initiative that suits corporations with sufficient time and funds to build an entirely new system using new technologies.
For example, organizations can rewrite ERP systems for a global enterprise using the latest advancements in technology, including cloud architecture, AI-powered recommendations, and real-time data analytics.
Now that we know the main approaches to legacy modernization, let’s dive into the key benefits of upgrading your outdated tools.
Modern architecture patterns like microservices make applications easier to manage and maintain by allowing businesses to isolate different services. In other words, when a service malfunctions in a monolithic architecture, the entire app is down—but in microservices, teams can isolate a faulty service while keeping the rest of the app online. This leads to more efficient resource allocation, improved performance, and reduced operational expenses. In fact, research by MoldStud reveals that companies experience a 20% to 30% boost in process efficiency after modernizing their apps.
Legacy applications are notoriously difficult to maintain, update, and support, which in the long run makes them even more outdated and eventually obsolete. The data is usually dispersed across multiple databases, and the systems rely on specific legacy hardware, increasing the costs and complexity of maintenance. Legacy application modernization process eliminates the silos and centralizes data and apps in a single location, enabling better accessibility and maintainability.
The inability to scale is a significant concern when it comes to legacy systems. Modernizing legacy applications and migrating to the cloud removes the constraints of a traditional on-premise environment. Cloud migration services unlock on-demand scalability, allowing your company to seamlessly grow and shrink as the business objectives and market situations change.
The process of legacy modernization also facilitates smoother system integration by relying on API-first designs. The ability to easily integrate with other systems eliminates data silos, enables organization-wide connectivity, and facilitates digital transformation. With a modern app, you can share data across applications, enhance customer support, and remove redundancies and inconsistencies in datasets.
Among the top reasons for modernizing legacy apps in the first place, data security plays a major role in any organization. While legacy systems and legacy software often suffer from poor security protocols, modernization efforts can bolster your cybersecurity posture. Updated applications rely on new technologies to protect company assets and comply with data privacy laws like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. Legacy systems that were built a long time ago, before these guidelines were established, are more exposed to breaches and attacks.
Modern architectures can also resolve software development bottlenecks associated with legacy systems. The latest frameworks, languages, and other tools provide a faster app development process, unlock debugging features, and even streamline coding with AI assistants. On top of that, teams can develop and deploy features separately while reducing the amount of manual effort involved in these steps.
The introduction of modern practices like DevOps will amplify these benefits by enabling automation in the development pipelines. Furthermore, containerization and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deliver stable and repeatable deployments across environments. Legacy app modernization in conjunction with DevOps principles empowers businesses to build, test, and release new features a lot faster.
According to MoldStud, companies that focus on upgrading user interfaces during their modernization processes observe a 200% increase in user satisfaction. Users have become accustomed to a certain ease of navigation and quality of interfaces solidified by UI/UX practices. If your app takes a few seconds longer to load than a competitor’s, you might eventually lose your customer base. Upgrading your systems with a new platform and enhanced code will enable you to generate an interactive, responsive, and aesthetically pleasing user interface that will enhance customer experience.
According to an IBM study, organizations that modernize their legacy system can save up to 50% in maintenance costs and 74% in staff, hardware, and software expenses, as well as boost revenue by 14%. By making the business more efficient, modernizing legacy applications can also lead to significant cuts in expenditure. From forgoing expensive legacy hardware costs and accelerating software development to boosting employee productivity and expanding the talent pool, your modernization efforts can reduce expenses by a significant margin.
Finally, updating legacy code and apps can future-proof your systems and offer better protection from market fluctuations and other external forces. With continuous integration and resilient security practices, your company is more prepared to deal with evolving technologies, ever-changing user demands, and financial instabilities.
Finally, let’s explore the guide that will address the step-by-step process of application modernization. So, how can you modernize legacy applications in an efficient way?
Like any other ambitious project, modernizing legacy applications begins with a thorough investigation into the current system and its components. You must consider both business and IT-related factors to provide a comprehensive assessment. Business-related factors include alignment with business objectives, business value generation, and app’s adaptability to changing environments. As for IT-related factors, these involve costs of maintenance, implementation complexity, and security risks.
Document your findings and list all system components such as databases, APIs, business logic, and integrations. Identify bottlenecks in your IT infrastructure and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed head-on.
Achieving concrete results is impossible without clear and, most importantly, measurable goals. Define business objectives that will guide your legacy application modernization initiative. For example, common goals revolve around increasing operational efficiency, reducing costs of maintenance, and enhancing scalability. The crucial part is to set specific benchmarks that will help you evaluate the success of modernization strategy.
You can involve C-level executives to provide authority and expertise when aligning various interests and goals within the organization. Known as executive sponsorship, this team is there to communicate strategic direction and convey the importance of modernization across departments.
In this step, take a deeper look into the legacy application modernization strategies that we’ve discussed above and choose the best approach for your unique situation. Depending on your business objectives, budgetary possibilities, existing infrastructure, and other aspects, select a strategy that offers the balance of business and technical gains.
You can begin by establishing a so-called Center of Excellence (CoE)—a team composed of legacy modernization specialists who can bring their expertise to your project. Working together, they should determine the criteria for choosing the best strategy. The CoE is intended to select the proper tech stack, best practices, and governance processes to make your digital transition as smooth as possible.
The next step involves establishing the right IT team to tackle the strenuous task of modernization. If you have internal talent who can deal with this process, include them as soon as possible and assign roles to ensure a smooth collaboration with minimal resistance to change. Alternatively, consider hiring external specialists—including cloud migration experts, DevOps consulting, business analysts, etc.—to help you with data migration, legacy system modernization, business analytics, and other tasks.
Plan the entire process, including timelines, deliverables, deadlines, scope of each task, and assignees. First, focus on key features of legacy application modernization and prioritize flexible microservices architecture, compatibility with existing workflows and tools, as well as overall performance and user experience.
This stage involves technically heavy steps involving mapping data structures between legacy and modern systems, cleaning legacy data, developing migration scripts, and more. Leave this part of the digital transformation journey to either your internal IT team or external partner, as it requires a deeper understanding of how migration and modernization work.
User training is essential for a smooth and effortless implementation of updated software across the organization. Digital adoption platforms are often used to streamline this process and make it easier for end users. Such tools act as guides by offering step-by-step workflows, explaining features and capabilities, and providing in-app customer support.
In addition to technical training, provide a holistic approach with change management that goes beyond technical guidelines. Create an environment that allows employees to gradually change the way they work, collaborate, and interact with business processes. Even if you think the new system is highly intuitive, delivering a clear and concise tutorial along with a fundamental cultural shift will make the transition significantly simpler.
Lastly, implement monitoring and analytics tools to track system performance, user metrics, and business outcomes. The tracking systems should observe the metrics that you have selected in the beginning to measure the modernization success comprehensively. Additionally, involve users in the loop to ensure performance improvements. Ask your user base to provide feedback, suggest new features, and share their experiences.
NIX is a seasoned software development partner with decades of experience in guiding companies through the digital transformation journey. A population health platform contacted the NIX team to upgrade its legacy software that could no longer keep up with current market demands. It was decided to gradually modernize the existing tool as well as develop a new SaaS platform from scratch. This combination was designed to provide a smooth transition path while ensuring long-term business growth.
The NIX team opted for a microservice architecture to enhance security, performance, and accelerate deployment. To deliver a modular and maintainable user interface, NIX chose micro front-end architecture. The new platform was also built using the latest tech stack, including Go and React and a distributed database.
As a result, the population health platform is equipped with automated medical data processing, customization, data visualization, tracking, and robust security. The app’s patient list quadrupled in a short period thanks to valuable insights into user data and physician performance.
As businesses grow and evolve, legacy system modernization becomes an essential part. The longer you wait, the more outdated your software gets, which makes the upgrading processes more time-consuming, expensive, and technically challenging. If your applications are hard and costly to maintain, security threats are imminent, and system integration is non-existent, it may be time to hop on the digital transformation path.
Rely on a trustworthy IT partner with NIX, a software development company with years of experience across domains. Reach out to us to discuss our legacy application modernization services and how we can help you unlock the potential hindered by the legacy systems.
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It’s not always necessary to modernize legacy apps. The necessity occurs when legacy code and architecture begin to create issues for your business, such as system performance failure, high maintenance costs, elevated security risks, and misalignment with business goals. If your legacy app meets business and technical requirements, operates properly, and doesn’t pose threats to data safety, there is no need to upgrade it.
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The key difference between rewriting and refactoring lies in the architecture: while refactoring doesn’t involve any changes in the architecture, rewriting implies redevelopment of the entire system. You should consider rewriting when the legacy app requires profound changes to technologies, data models, and architectural patterns. Refactoring is suitable when the underlying architecture runs smoothly, but some changes to the code are necessary to improve performance.
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When choosing the best modernization strategy for your use case, consider business objectives, technical complexity, risk tolerance, and budgetary constraints. First, make the choice between evolutionary and revolutionary approaches and narrow down the best courses of action from there. For instance, if your systems were built on solid architecture yet outdated technologies, opt for refactoring or replatforming.
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