Application Modernization Services: Transforming your Legacy Systems
A smartphone with nil or outdated applications is prone to vulnerabilities. Now, imagine the same scenario with your enterprise applications. An outdated application can keep your systems vulnerable to security breaches, cause compatibility issues, create data silos, and eventually hinder organizational growth due to poor productivity. Quite in tandem, right? But how can one avoid this?The challenges with legacy apps are no small feat, but with the help of application modernization services, businesses can improve overall productivity and scalability, foster innovation, and stay agile to evolving market demands.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is updating outdated applications and modernizing their infrastructure to the cloud-first model to meet current technology standards and user expectations.
Understanding Legacy Applications and their Challenges:
Legacy applications are outdated software systems that present many challenges to enterprises. They might be software systems built using old programming languages or applications designed on outdated hardware.
While they often provide critical business functions, legacy applications have significant challenges that affect organizations' operations and growth. Below are some of the major challenges of legacy applications.
1. Limited Scalability:
Legacy applications often struggle to handle modern workloads and may lack the responsiveness and performance required for the current business environment. These inefficiencies may lead to increased downtime, bottlenecks, and reduced IT efficiency. Due to their poor scalability, it becomes difficult for businesses to adapt legacy systems to multi-regional operations and expand the business.
2. Data Migration and Integration:
Legacy systems typically operate in silos hence migrating data from these legacy systems to different platforms can be risky and complex and may lead to data loss. Also, integrating data with modern services and applications is difficult due to different architectures and formats hindering the ability to leverage data effectively across organizations.
3. Security vulnerabilities:
Security vulnerabilities are one of the major challenges legacy applications face. As they often run on outdated software systems, they are vulnerable to malware, keeping them in the spotlight of evolving cyberattacks and data breaches. After some point, developers no longer provide security upgrades for legacy applications, which can expose end users to cyber threats.
4. Maintenance cost:
Maintaining legacy systems is expensive due to their reliance on outdated technologies such as Pascal or COBOL, which are no longer widely taught or understood. Hiring experts with these skills is costly. Moreover, legacy systems often require old hardware, making them expensive to source and maintain. As systems age, they become prone to performance issues and failure, requiring costly repairs and frequent patches.
Why Enterprises Need Application Modernization Services
Most businesses have spent a significant amount of time and resources on building and maintaining their legacy systems. These might be old systems, but they still handle a few crucial tasks depending on the business. The best strategy to save costs and enjoy the benefits of updated systems is to follow an application modernization service. Through application development services, businesses can reap the advantage of newer software tools, platforms, libraries, architecture, and frameworks. Without completely replacing their legacy systems, they can enjoy the benefits of updated systems, such as better security, great scalability, and faster performance, making it a cost-effective way to stay competitive in the market.
Key Trends of Application Modernization Services
Let’s dive into the application modernization service trends that will redefine how businesses secure, optimize, and innovate their systems.
1. Low-Code & No-Code Development Using PowerApps
Faster development cycles:
Microsoft Power Apps offers a low–code and no-code development platform for building business applications requiring little to no coding expertise. The user-friendly platform simplifies the traditional application development process by offering a great visual interface.
Users can drag and drop prebuilt components and design applications tailored to their business needs. This allows businesses to develop and deploy applications faster and more easily than traditional methods.
Seamless integration capabilities:
One of the standout features of Microsoft Power Apps is its smooth integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, allowing enterprises utilize various tools like Dynamics 365, Microsoft SharePoint, and Office 365. This connectivity between the tools helps businesses harness data and existing workflows and modernize outdated legacy applications without extensive reengineering. Additionally, it allows seamless integration of applications with hundreds of third-party services through connectors, ensuring that businesses extend their app functionality as required.
Cost efficiency:
Building applications low-code and no-code requires minimal coding skills, reducing the need for specialized developers and lowering the organization's development costs.
Furthermore, Low-code/no-code tools facilitate better integration with legacy applications, allowing businesses to modernize their existing infrastructure without requiring a complete system over change. This approach allows companies to bridge the gap between outdated technologies and modern cloud-based solutions.
Cloud readiness:
Applications built using Low-code/no-code platforms are designed to be mobile-friendly and cloud-native, perfectly aligning with modern technology trends. They allow businesses to provide better user experience, scalability, and remote access.
Security and compliance:
Low-code/no-code platforms come with built-in compliance and security features, ensuring applications meet industry standards and minimizing the risk of cyber threats.
2. AI and Automation
Infusing AI into legacy systems helps organizations automate processes, improve user experience, enable advanced analytics, and transform legacy systems to stay competitive and agile. For example, Generative AI helps analyze legacy application code and rewrite it automatically into modern programming languages.
NLP allows legacy systems to interact intuitively with users through voice commands and chat interfaces. Computer vision enhances the capabilities of legacy applications by automating several tasks, such as image analysis, data extraction, and quality control in industries like logistics and manufacturing. With computer vision technology, an end user can scan the document through OCR and learn about a particular service or business offering.
Similarly, by infusing AI into legacy applications, businesses can deliver instant responses to end users through conversational AI chatbots powered by AI. Businesses can use RPA to automate tasks, such as data entry and migration report generation and distribution, reporting and data analysis, and more.
3. Cloud Computing
Legacy applications remain on-premises and do not support cloud storage, making them difficult to scale due to limited storage. This presents a great challenge for businesses aiming to modernize their applications and stay ahead of their competitors. Application modernization services support cloud computing, which can help legacy systems leverage cloud services without limiting themselves to on-premises. Moving to Cloud helps businesses remain agile, scalable, and globally accessible to end users.
Similarly, legacy applications are monolithic, making them slow and outdated when evolving with changing business trends. However, Azure offers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Azure Functions, and Azure App Services to break down monolithic applications into microservices, containerize them, and host them on cloud platforms.
Conclusion:
Application Modernization can help businesses eliminate challenges associated with outdated applications. At Saxon AI, we are equipped with experts who provide the best application modernization services. We leverage cloud, AI&ML, No-code technologies, and automation to ease data management processes. With over 20 years of experience, we have helped many businesses modernize their legacy systems.
Application modernization services help businesses to upgrade their legacy and outdated applications
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