Modernization isn’t a new term – enterprises like yours have been updating on-premises, legacy systems to the cloud for years. But legacy technology poses a number of challenges that application modernization can solve.
The five pillars of application modernization enable you to optimize your business systems, transforming the way your business works and keeping it up-to-date. These pillars are:
- Application transformation
- Networking
- Cloud modernization
- Application migration
- Custom application development
In this blog post, we’ll look closely at application transformation and what it means for your application modernization journey. Stay tuned for additional posts on the remaining pillars of application modernization.
Understanding Application Transformation
Application transformation is the process of assessing current or legacy applications and then planning and conducting migrations. This allows you to bring business-critical, legacy applications to modern infrastructures and keeps these applications relevant and aligned with modern user expectations.
By evolving from legacy applications to always improving applications, you can maintain a competitive edge, accelerate improvements, and improve flexibility.
When planning your cloud transition or deployment, assessing your existing applications will lead you to determine the best path to take toward modernization. Your assessment will identify:
- Applications to migrate to the cloud
- Applications to redesign
- Applications to maintain in the existing enterprise
- The priorities for an eventual transition to the cloud
Three Steps of Application Transformation
- Plot the application based on its complexity and its criticality to the customer and your organization’s future
- Those applications that are high-value, low effort (i.e. low-hanging fruit) should be in your first wave of modernization
- Determine how you will modernize the applications: rehost, refactor, replatform, or replace
When utilizing application transformation, you will need to assess all stages of an application’s lifecycle. Be sure to focus on the potential for new business outcomes, opportunities for new applications, security, and compliance, plus the application’s management and maintenance.
Includes reducing the number of applications within an enterprise to moving applications to the cloud to ensuring that apps meet updated compliance and governance requirements
Key Questions to Ask During Application Transformation
- What are the business-critical applications?
- What improvements will provide a better customer experience?
- Do applications need to be brought up to speed, replaced, consolidated, or retired?
- How can you transform applications at a low cost while reducing risk?
- What processes will help modernization efforts succeed?
- How can your IT teams best monitor applications to meet business-defined service-level agreements?
- Can you manage application changes without disrupting business?
Business Benefits of Application Transformation
There are many benefits to application transformation, including:
- The ability to address security vulnerabilities with containerized or streamlined code
- Improved flexibility and reliability for easier and more dependable maintenance
- Saving time and money while maintaining software
- The introduction of automation for patching and security upgrades
- Increased agility in accelerating the release cycle
- Cost savings for hosting in the public cloud vs. on-premises
- Opportunities for increased reliability and redundancy
Perficient’s Application Modernization Expertise
The world’s leading brands partner with Perficient because we have the resources to scale major cloud projects and focused expertise for specific areas of your business. We partner with leading technology companies to help Fortune 1000 clients across all industries, and we’ve been recognized by analysts as a top service provider for application modernization and migration.
Contact us today to get started on your application modernization journey.
