When you talk about the future success of your company, it is not the outdated IT infrastructure that your company has left that comes to mind. However, many companies do not take the necessary steps to modernize their applications and find themselves in such a situation.
The reasons for using application modernization services may vary from company to company. However, they often revolve around the following points: too difficult a task, lack of budget, return on investment, or lack of internal experience to use modern technologies that are becoming more and more complex. This is why many companies prefer to keep their legacy systems in working order. However, we have now reached a point where upgrading applications is no longer a luxury or just an option that you can think of. This is absolutely necessary if you want to increase the continuity of your business, economically manage day-to-day operations, and ensure cost optimization.
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What is upgrading legacy applications?
Upgrading legacy applications is the process of converting an outdated system into a modern IT infrastructure. Common reasons for upgrading include reducing IT costs and improving consistency, flexibility, and collaboration in all aspects of your business.
You can consider this process as an update to your software. By completing the modernization of legacy applications, you will create a reliable modern platform that combines the capabilities of legacy enterprise applications with all the advantages that modern technologies and software architectures can offer.
Problems caused by outdated systems and outdated technologies
Legacy systems face a lot of problems. Here are some examples:
- Technologies are developing at an incredible pace, and new innovations are being developed every day. Existing applications use old technologies, which often make them out-of-date. Therefore, they cannot be updated or even improved to integrate with modern applications that have become vital for modern business.
- Lack of skills in managing outdated applications. Companies worry that they don’t have employees who have the skills to understand and manage the complexities of modern applications, but the opposite is also true. People are not inclined to learn how to use old technologies. And when employees with this knowledge retire or leave the company, they no longer have anyone who has experience supporting their outdated applications.
- Poor documentation. If you have ever tried to troubleshoot a Windows Vista system, you know that very little information is available about older systems and applications. Often, the information you find is so outdated that it becomes irrelevant, completely incorrect, or incomplete.
- Lack of support from suppliers. When application vendors update their products, they gradually stop supporting older versions of their software. For example, Windows no longer supports systems using the Vista operating system, and the popular instant messaging app WhatsApp no longer works on older smartphones.
- Continuing to use legacy applications can significantly affect the continuity of your business due to their unreliability. Not only do they often lead to high maintenance costs, but there is also a risk of a domino effect when one problem leads to another. And before you know it, all your business applications will be disabled.
The three main advantages of upgrading legacy applications
The truth is simple: not all applications need to be upgraded, and not all applications can be upgraded. However, legacy applications that are necessary for everyday work, but which may rely on outdated technologies, are often key applications for your business. And in their case, the benefits of modernization outweigh the costs.
Cost reduction
The decision on whether to upgrade your applications or not often comes down to cost. Although it is obvious that upgrading applications and switching to new technologies is expensive, not including application modernization in a digital transformation strategy also comes with significant costs.
Reduced support costs
Maintaining an outdated application can be expensive, especially if the application vendor has stopped supporting the platforms or servers you use, or when there are no more developers who know the code that your application uses and can help you maintain it.
Reducing the use of resources
Most business applications run on virtual machines (VMs) on physical servers. By switching to containers, which are essentially a cloud version of a virtual machine, but without the need for an operating system image, you can reduce the amount of resources needed to run these applications, saving resources, the most important of which is memory.
Conclusion
Every business should be able to articulate the reasons why upgrading their applications is a wise decision. Greater flexibility, the ability to provide a better experience for everyone, and lower costs are the three main factors to consider when determining which projects will get the green light. And, as you can see, upgrading your application meets all three of these criteria and even more.
