In today’s digital-first economy, businesses face relentless pressure to innovate. Legacy applications, often built on outdated architectures like monolithic systems or on-premises infrastructure, struggle to meet modern demands for agility, scalability, and security.
Gartner, in a recent research paper, highlights that “legacy applications often impede continuous delivery of value,” and suggests “applications and software engineering leaders should instead use continuous modernization to minimize the cost, risk and impact of legacy-application optimization.”
Application modernization isn’t merely about adopting new technology; it’s a strategic overhaul to align IT infrastructure with business goals. It is also important to understand that application modernization is also a continuous process. Companies that modernize effectively can unlock benefits such as:
- Business agility: Businesses must adapt to market, technology, and customer demands quickly.
- Enhanced user experience: Modern users expect seamless, intuitive, and personalized experiences. Legacy apps often fall short.
- Cost optimization: Reduced maintenance and scalable cloud resources translate into lower costs.
- Future-proofing: Emerging technologies like edge computing and AI present opportunities to improve business processes.
- Security and Compliance: Modernization helps address security vulnerabilities in legacy systems and ensures compliance with evolving data privacy regulations.
Assess your application landscape
Your modernization journey should start with an audit of your existing applications. This involves categorizing systems based on their business criticality, technical debt, and alignment with strategic goals. This helps you to not only categorize them as above but also prioritize them as needed.
Key assessment criteria
Business value:
- Which applications directly impact revenue or customer satisfaction?
- Example: A retail company might prioritize modernizing its e-commerce platform over internal HR tools.
Technical feasibility:
- Evaluate code quality, dependencies, and compatibility with modern frameworks.
- Tools like CAST Highlight or SonarQube can automate code analysis to identify vulnerabilities.
Cost-benefit analysis:
- Calculate the ROI of modernization versus maintaining the status quo.
- For instance, migrating a legacy CRM to the cloud might reduce infrastructure and operational costs by 40% while improving uptime.
Recommendation: Use the “6 Rs” framework (rehost, replatform, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, replace) to prioritize modernization strategies for each application.
Adopt a cloud-first strategy
Migration to a cloud-native architecture is a cornerstone of application modernization. A cloud-native approach (e.g., leveraging Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or a private cloud) enables organizations to scale dynamically, integrate advanced services (generative AI, machine learning, serverless computing, etc.), and reduce capital expenses.
Cloud migration best practices
Lift and shift (rehosting):
- Quickly migrate legacy applications to the cloud with minimal code changes. Ideal for time-sensitive projects.
- Example: A financial services firm may decide to move their on-premises legacy Java applications to the cloud by containerizing and cutting infrastructure and operational costs up to 30% or 40%.
Refactoring for PaaS:
- Rebuild components using platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions like Choreo and Azure Application Service to automate updates and improve security and scalability.
Hybrid cloud solutions:
- Balance security and flexibility by keeping sensitive data on-premises while migrating customer-facing apps to the cloud.
Challenges to consider: Avoid vendor lock-in by designing applications with cloud-agnostic architectures (e.g., Kubernetes for container orchestration) and consider platforms such as Choreo that help you operate multicloud without lock-in.
Embrace microservices and API-driven architectures
Most organizations have legacy monoliths that often lack the agility to support rapid updates. While monoliths aren’t always a bad pattern, breaking them into microservices (small, independent modules) brings important benefits:
- Faster development cycles: Teams can update individual services without disrupting the system.
- Improved resilience: Failures that would otherwise cause system-wide outages are isolated.
Implementation considerations:
- Use Docker and Kubernetes to containerize and manage microservices and avoid trying to build this platform yourself.
- Leverage APIs to integrate modernized apps with third-party tools (e.g., payment gateways, analytics platforms).
A good case study: Netflix’s shift to microservices reduced deployment times from hours to seconds, supporting its global scalability. Their patterns and architecture have become blueprints for many organizations globally.
Prioritize security and compliance
Although legacy stacks may consist of security issues and vulnerabilities, you should not ignore the fact that modernization introduces new attack surfaces. Embed security into every phase of the process:
- Shift-left security: Integrate vulnerability scanning into CI/CD pipelines, and ensure APIs are secure externally as well as internally.
- Zero-trust architecture: Implement strict access controls and encryption for cloud workloads regardless of whether they are internally or externally consumed.
- Compliance: Ensure good governance and procedures are in place to align with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA by auditing, reporting, and alerting.
Recommendation: Implementation or embedding security into every phase of the process can be hard, therefore it is best to consider platforms that offer these capabilities without lock-in.
Foster a devops and platform engineering culture
Modernization is not just a technological change, it is also a culture shift. It requires collaboration between development, operations, and business teams.
- Automate build and delivery/deployment pipelines with tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, or by using platforms such as Choreo and Harness that offer end-to-end capabilities.
- Ensure you have a modern observability platform to detect bottlenecks post-migration and post operations do not add more load to DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineering teams.
- Upskill teams to embrace cloud-native technologies without increasing the cognitive load.
Things to watch out for: Everyone loves new technologies and cool things, but culture shifts can be hard to accept for many workers. Early communication and getting affected groups involved are essential to success in any modernization journey.
Modernization as a continuous journey
Today’s apps will be legacy by tomorrow. Application modernization isn’t a one-time project but an ongoing commitment to innovation. By combining cloud computing, microservices, devops, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, and security by design, businesses can transform legacy systems into agile, scalable, and secure assets. Start with a pilot project (e.g., modernizing a single customer-facing app), measure the outcomes, and scale iteratively.
As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, aptly said, IT and application modernization are no longer an optional project, but the key to business resilience.
Kanchana Wickremasinghe is vice president and general manager of Choreo at WSO2.
—
New Tech Forum provides a venue for technology leaders—including vendors and other outside contributors—to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all inquiries to doug_dineley@foundryco.com.