Legacy Application Modernization: Best Practices & Risks

This guide shows you how. You will be equipped to choose the ideal modernization strategy for your use case, learn the best practices, and know things to avoid.

What is Legacy Application Modernization?

Legacy application modernization is the practice of upgrading, transforming, or replacing legacy software that has been in use for years to better meet current and future business goals. This can be simply adding more functionalities, shutting down applications that are no longer yielding desirable results, or moving them to a completely new platform or technology. The process is done using modern architecture, design principles, tools, etc.

In most cases, modernization is part of a broader digital transformation initiative. A successful modernization project can come with plenty of advantages, such as:

• Reduced maintenance costs
• Enhanced security
• AI adoption
• Efficient workflows
• Better user experiences
• Improved performance
• Better scalability
• Integration with modern technologies

Modernization does not always have to start from scratch. Rather, it means applying new techniques to get more value or solve problems related to performance, security, scalability, and maintainability of existing systems and ensuring that you get the best returns on previous investments.

There are a number of approaches you can apply, depending on your goals and how much change you are willing to embrace. These can include (but are not limited to) such solutions as fixing and rehosting old code, to simply redesigning or even rebuilding systems from scratch.

Real-World Use Cases

Now that you understand the theory behind legacy application modernization, let’s understand it practically. Below are the industry-wise use cases of it:

Manufacturing ERP Modernization

Manufacturing companies often migrate on-premises ERP systems to the cloud. This transformation gives them the visibility of real-time inventory tracking, helps them with coordination among multiple departments, and increases effectiveness at all levels.

Financial Institutions

Banks move their old customer relationship management (CRM) system to the cloud so that they can take advantage of the cloud’s reliability. This provides much better security of customer data. Further, this move allows for improved collaboration across diverse team locations.

Government Agencies

Government agencies move their legacy case management workloads to a more dynamic environment. Which in turn, shortens the processing time, which leads to more efficiency and better public services.

Risks of Avoiding Legacy Application Modernization

Is your legacy environment becoming risky? If so, you might be ignoring the problem because you believe you still have time to fix it.

Southwest Airlines was making the same mistake. But what happened next is something any business wants to avoid:

A Real-World Example

A major winter storm hit the US on December 21, 2022, causing widespread flight cancellations during the peak holiday season. Despite the disaster, all but a few airlines were able to get travelers where they wanted to go on Friday.

But that was not true for Southwest Airlines. They experienced disruptions at the highest level and had to cancel over 15000 flights the next day. Even worse? In fact, they cancelled more than 2,500 flights daily for the next seven days.

But what caused this malfunction? The scheduling system had been running for decades. Despite several warnings by the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association Union, Southwest Airlines ignored the warning signs. Ultimately, they had to face a breakdown, resulting in a revenue loss (worth a million or more) and reputational damage.

Major Risks of Ignoring Legacy Application Modernization

Sometimes, IT decision-makers tend to avoid legacy application modernization due to the costs and risks involved. But postponing modernization can be even more risky. Here are the key risks involved:

Risk of higher maintenance costs than expected:

According to ServiceNow, legacy systems cost people around 40,000 dollars annually.

If you dig deeper into it, the legacy applications often reside on hardware that has surpassed its lifecycle (end-of-life) and is costing organizations significantly.

Can you afford to pay such a large amount annually for maintenance, considering that your IT budget has other important aspects to manage?

Risk of losing users or brand trust:

An article by NTT DATA shows that 45% of customers stop spending money with a company right after experiencing something bad.

Ignoring the warning signs and not modernizing legacy applications can lead to malfunctions and ultimately frustrate users. So, think twice before procrastinating on the migration decision.

Risk of losing vendor support:

Let’s discuss the main challenge: a lack of support in all areas. Imagine an error occurs, but you receive no support from the vendor – what would you do in that case? What’s worse, the engineers who know these old systems have already retired. In such situations, you will be left clueless, regretting not taking action earlier.

Creates data silos:

For those who don’t know, data silos are isolated repositories of data, inaccessible to other parts of the business unit. Legacy software doesn’t integrate well with other programs.

When your business adopts new software, this situation leads to data silos. As a result, this limits your ability to add new capabilities and slows down processes.

What are Your Options?

Choosing popular strategies often seems to be the safest path (but it isn’t). Your business is different. Your goals are different. Your legacy workloads are different. And your budget, time, and risk-taking capacity are also different.

Does it make sense to choose a solution because it’s popular? No, right? Here are the solutions available. Choose according to your use case:

Best Practices

Even after knowing the strategies, many businesses fail to achieve their intended goals. The problem lies in execution. Here are some of the non-negotiable things you can’t ignore:

1. Set Clear and Measurable Objectives

Take your time to set quantitative goals. Share them with the people involved and clearly explain the ‘why’ behind your investment. Are you trying to make the system faster, easier to use, cheaper to maintain, or something else?

Communicate clearly (be specific) what exactly the modernization effort hopes to achieve so that everyone knows what to focus on and what to ignore.

2. Maintain Comprehensive Documentation:

As the saying goes, “everyone should be on the same page” – document every move you make during your application modernization process (and particularly so if you’re in an enterprise environment with many people contributing).

Further, you don’t want a project where in the middle, you realize that you have forgotten how to put everything together.

Documentation will help you:

• Ensure correct processes are followed at each level
• Enable the tracking of key metrics and KPIs
• Assess progress and course-correct
• Make monitoring easier
• Future modernization projects as a point of reference

3. Ensure Thorough Assessment and Planning:

Before starting the modernization effort, first evaluate all your applications. This includes finding out which applications to modernize, understanding how the applications are currently built, and their impact on the business.

4. Use an Incremental Modernization Approach:

Opt for an incremental approach instead of an all-at-once modernization approach. Why?

The phased approach minimizes business disruption. You will also get the time to gather feedback and make improvements.

So, start with low-stakes components, implement, learn from them, and then move to the most critical components.

5. Adopt DevOps Practices

DevOps focuses on automation, CI/CD, and the synchronous relationship between development and operations teams. Automating the deployment pipeline leads to fewer human errors and faster product release.

6. Automate as Much as Possible

We are living in an era of automation, and it’s never too late to add that to modernisation projects as well. Rule-based automation enables you to apply certain conditions based on your own preferences and minimizes manual interventions. Template-based automation is also there, but this one is predefined.

Some additional tips:

• Break down the modernization project into smaller parts that can be frequently re-evaluated.
• Cross-team cooperation will lead to better and faster issue resolution. So, stick to that.
• Communicate clearly. Continuous feedback from users and stakeholders validates that the project is going in the right direction. Knowledge sharing or some mentorship between team members might also aid in this.

Challenges You Might Face

At this point, you’ve chosen the modernization strategies and have the best practices with you. Now the question is how to make the most of it? Perhaps a better question: how can you meet the goals without any bottlenecks?

Let’s explore the key challenges and discover why avoiding them is so important in your modernization journey:

Firstly, you can face technical debt. Think of a situation where your final expenses exceed your budget. This mostly happens when developers go for quick code fixes.

Legacy systems may not integrate well with the new system due to differences in technology or protocols. This can lead to downtime.

Improper data migration can lead to data corruption and loss of trust. Moreover, legacy data becomes incompatible with modern systems and formats.

Another challenge is the reluctance to change. Employees or users may not always want to change what they have been using for years.

Modernization isn’t Always the Solution: Here’s Why

This is where hardware emulation or lift and shift comes into the picture. It is the process of creating an exact equivalent hardware interface (similar to the legacy hardware) on a different hardware platform. As a result, your legacy applications perceive the new environment as the same one they have been operating in for years, without realizing that the original hardware has changed.

Stromasys Charon is one of the most popular choices in this category. It emulates legacy hardware such as SPARC, HP 9000, HP 3000, VAX, Alpha and PDP on modern computers, extending the lifespan of legacy software like Solaris, HP-UX, MPE, OpenVMS, Tru64 and RT-11.

As the applications remain untouched, you don’t need to write any code and still enjoy the benefits of modern infrastructure.