Much has been stated about the importance of digital transformation to survive and thrive in today’s digital economy. Digital transformation means something different to every organization. Whether it’s improving operational agility, supporting the increasing volumes of data, improving security, or something different, each organization is banking on the value of digital transformation.
But even the best digital transformation efforts can be waylaid by shrinking budgets—even more so in today’s economic climate. IT must balance the need to improve its operational outcomes with limited funds (aka, do more with less). Complete infrastructure overhauls are out of the question, so the focus has shifted to application modernization.
Checking the Boxes
Application modernization is the process of updating older, legacy applications to work on modern platform infrastructures. It’s not a new concept; the push to the cloud is perhaps the most common example. But application modernization is gaining more traction as organizations seek to retire or replace outdated hardware and systems (think mainframes) and reduce their dependency on legacy code.
Application modernization checks all the boxes of reducing costs associated with maintaining older technologies, increasing system agility and compatibility, eliminating security vulnerabilities, and boosting employee productivity.
Reducing costs of maintaining older technologies: Legacy technologies are becoming a burden to many organizations, as they are incapable of processing large volumes of data. What’s more, the pool of IT employees who are qualified and experienced in working with these legacy systems is quickly shrinking. Modernizing applications helps reduce the overhead associated with these growing costs.
Increasing system agility and compatibility: There is an entire market dedicated to tools designed to shorten project time frames and improve their outcomes, not to mention the increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in applications ranging from back office to customer service. Unfortunately, many legacy systems aren’t able to run these modern technologies—or, if they can, they are unable to reap all the intended benefits. Modernization can address many of the agility and compatibility issues—also known as technical debt—by harnessing the power of the cloud and dispersing monolithic applications into multiple, containerized workloads that can be managed independently without having to spin down environments.
Eliminating security vulnerabilities: Outdated, legacy applications aren’t supported by vendors, which can make for a porous IT environment. At the same time, outdated code in legacy applications can hide potential security vulnerabilities, which can then be exploited by hackers and cause data breaches or, worse, a system failure. A security-first approach to modernizing applications enables organizations to use secure web application firewalls and other Zero Trust security technologies and protect their systems and data most effectively.
Boosting employee productivity: Beyond the ability to run the aforementioned modern technologies, a modernized environment reduces or even eliminates the time, effort, and cost of training teams on legacy systems. Also, the ability to automate repetitive tasks and adopt newer, more efficient processes in modern application environments can help improve productivity by reducing the bottlenecks and friction that often occur in legacy IT environments.
In an upcoming post, we’ll look at some of the trends IT leaders are adopting in the digital age.
