4 ideas that can help Modernize your Applications - i2e Consulting

As companies are embarking on their modernization journey for speed efficiency, scalability or to keep pace with changing times. In hopes to greater ROI and competitive advantage, companies are choosing modern infrastructures such as cloud and container and rightly so. However, problems such as longer timelines and overshooting budgets, vendor lock-ins often lead to modernizing conundrum.  

Through this blog, we will discuss a few tips and approaches to help you get the best out of your modernization journey.  

1. 1. Rethink Architecture: Legacy systems architecture is often monolithic; they are built as a single unit. Such systems are not future-ready because every time you make changes to the system you need to rebuild and deploy it leaving scope for inefficiencies and mounting costs. Application modernization widely uses microservices architecture today. This is a design approach where an application is broken down into smaller independent functional units that can be developed, deployed, and scaled individually. The objective of app modernization is to preserve business value while staying relevant in changing times and microservice architecture helps stay agile and be future-ready. 
   2. Decouple application and infrastructure: It is very important to have your application and infrastructure independent of one another. This helps prevent vendor lock-in and offers you the flexibility to choose vendors that offer the best combination of price, performance, reliability, and features. As an organization, you should have the option to use multiple clouds, change providers over time, or in general have independence from vendors. When an application is unshackled from the infrastructure you achieve full portability and can transfer your application from one platform to another without changing a single line of code. Your modernization effort should consider a platform that can run consistently in many environments and provides modern, agile development and operations.  
   3. Bake Security into Application: Security issues found later in the development cycle lead to increased costs, delays, and costly rework. As we are moving to the modern infrastructure of the cloud, a changed infrastructure implies new security controls. Things like built externalized credentials and policy management, security through automation and common and consistent security capabilities across multiple cloud environments should be paramount. As you modernize your application treat security as a component of your system just like any other business component. This will help keep your legacy application irrespective of the infrastructure used. 
   4. Modernization with DevOps Culture: DevOps culture is all about a shared understanding between developers and operations and sharing responsibility for the software they build. The DevOps concept was born out of the need to stay agile software that could keep up with the changing market trends. It encourages collaboration, transparency, automation, and continuous delivery of software. It is believed that modernization and DevOps are better together and enable mutual success. It also paves the way for incremental yet continuous legacy modernization.  

These are a few approaches that have worked in favor of organizations. Of course, the list is not exhaustive, and you may find other points to add to it. Whatever be your approach, I believe when it comes to modernization the always conduct a thorough assessment of your existing IT systems and applications and make sure your plan is future-ready. Set your goals, choose optimal measures, monitor and change, and repeat.