Modernising Applications for Tomorrow: TEKsystems’ Tips for Application Modernisation

22, July 2024

Preparing your Organisation for Application Modernisation

People

• Resistant to change: An application development team that’s using a specific development methodology over several years is often resistant to change that needs upskilling, changes in ways of working, and usage of new development practices and patterns.
• Skills gap: Organisations often lack the expertise in the modern development frameworks and cloud technologies required to successfully execute modernisation efforts.

Process

• Legacy integration: Integrating legacy systems with modern applications can be complex and time-consuming, requiring careful planning and execution to ensure seamless interoperability.
• DevSecOps adoption: Integrating DevSecOps practices to simplify development, testing and deployment procedures could cause delays for organisations with low levels of DevSecOps maturity.
• Governance and compliance: Adhering to compliance and governance frameworks will introduce delays in adoption of modern application architecture.

Technology

• Complexity of existing systems: Decoupling tight integration across legacy components and processes while maintaining feature requirements requires significant time and resources.
• Data migration and integration: Migrating data for applications that are based on monolithic architecture and integrations among other systems requires careful evaluation of dependencies, compatibility and configuration. The complexity results in additional time spent before data migration can be executed for modern decoupled systems.
• Documentation: Applications built over a long period often result in inconsistent documentation, which makes it difficult to understand the inner workings of the application, inhibiting the ability to plan modernisation effectively.

TEKsystemss Tips: Best Practices for Application Modernisation

• Assessment and prioritisation: Start by assessing your existing application portfolio to identify legacy systems that require modernisation. Prioritise applications based on factors such as business impact, technical debt and alignment with strategic objectives.
• Cost-benefit analysis: Conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis to understand the potential ROI for each modernisation initiative. Consider factors such as anticipated improvements in efficiency, productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue generation.
• Selection of the right modernisation approach: Choose the most suitable modernisation approach based on your specific requirements and constraints. This could involve refactoring legacy code, rearchitecting applications using microservices or containers, or migrating to cloud-based platforms.
• Streamlined development and deployment: Implement agile methodologies and DevOps practices to streamline the development and deployment processes. This allows for faster iteration cycles, reduced time to market, and greater flexibility in responding to changing requirements.
• Focus on scalability and flexibility: Modernise applications with scalability and flexibility in mind to accommodate future growth and evolving business needs. Utilise cloud-native architectures and technologies that enable elasticity and seamless integration with other systems.
• Enhanced user experience: Prioritise improvements to the user experience as part of the modernisation process. Modernised applications should be intuitive, responsive, and user-friendly, leading to increased user adoption and satisfaction.
• Security and compliance: Incorporate robust security measures into modernised applications to protect against cyber threats and ensure compliance with industry regulations. Invest in security testing, encryption, access controls, and regular vulnerability assessmens.
• Surveillance and optimisation: Adopt modern observability platforms and tools to continuously monitor the performance and usage of modernised applications to identify areas for further optimisation. Use site reliability engineering practices and principles to gather analytics insights and refine the application experience over time.

Measuring Success in Application Modernisation

A key step for a successful legacy modernisation initiative: Determine and specify the business objectives that can be assessed and tracked. For each business objective, organisations should:

• Establish and define the metrics that need to be collected.
• Baseline the current state value of those metrics.
• Estimate the potential value of those metrics post-transformation.

By establishing a practice of continuous tracking of these metrics across the application modernisation effort, the organisation can measure the improvements achieved.

Building Applications for Tomorrow

While the initial investment in application modernisation may be significant, the long-term cost savings can be substantial. Modernised applications require fewer resources to operate and maintain, resulting in lower operational costs over time. By eliminating legacy dependencies, reducing downtime and improving system efficiency, organisations can realise significant cost savings in areas such as infrastructure, support and maintenance.

Innovation without limits

We can help you rethink how your business creates modern, agile applications with a future state of mind. With a blend of data analytics, AI/ML-enabled technology, inventive concept development and full-stack omnichannel experiences, we’ll help you push the limits of innovation on the cloud. Whether your goal is process optimisation, business resiliency or revenue-driving transformation, find out how TEKsystems can support your Application Modernisation journey – so that you can adapt, respond and grow at speed. Find out more.