What is Legacy Application?
Legacy application or legacy technology refers to applications, platforms, hardware setups, programming languages, and other technologies that are no longer useful as newer options have replaced them. The reasons for turning a well-functioning software into an obsolete technology could be many, including:
- No maintenance from developers.
- No technical support is available for the users.
- Not compatible with the current versions.
- No more patches are available.
An application’s becoming a legacy is a gradual process. Unfortunately, businesses suffer because of legacy applications as it creates complications for the IT operations teams that support them.
Generally, a legacy app is frequently tied to a specific version of an OS or coding language. For instance, an application that runs on Windows 7 may not run on Windows 10, despite using many advanced methods. Plus, the older application requires more effort to arrange support for it.
Even if the legacy application poses multiple problems to the businesses, they still can’t replace it with a new one instantly. Replacing or upgrading may be expensive, and the company may lose vital data as well. That’s why they continue to use the legacy application.
But there are ways available to modernize legacy applications. So before we read about ways to update legacy applications, let”s understand more about legacy modernization.
Legacy Application Examples
Even after being outdated, some organizations continue to use legacy apps for specific functionalities.
Here are the top examples of legacy apps that you can find:
- No Update Available: Applications that offer no new version or updates are categorized as no update available. Due to no new feature, users may have to shift to alternatives.
- End of Life (EOL): Legacy apps are often based on technologies, programming languages, and frameworks. Apps or technologies used in those apps that have surpassed their useful age lead to vendor discontinuation, and hence they reach EOL.
- Mainframe Applications: These apps handled herculean data processing and were developed and deployed on mainframe computers. Industries such as banking and finance use such apps, mostly on proprietary OS.
What is Legacy Modernization?
Legacy modernization helps you transform a legacy system into a modern infrastructure to reduce IT costs, improve flexibility, collaboration, and consistency. It’s like a software update. Once the legacy application is transformed, it gets the dual strength of a robust application combined with old business applications to face modern-day challenges. As a result, legacy modernization helps an organization reduce its business operating costs and increase revenue.
Even if legacy application modernization helps in many ways, companies like to continue with the legacy application, impacting their workflow and revenue. Plus, clinging on to the old systems restrains them from having a competitive advantage.
Different Ways to Modernize Legacy Applications:
- Serverless: Using this approach, the organization can shift operational responsibilities to the cloud without relying on a server, increasing agility and innovation. Plus, you won’t need to do management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning to build and run applications.
Serverless architecture allows you to concentrate on your products rather than worrying about operating and managing servers all the time. Not only does it reduce overheads, but it also saves developers time and energy.
- Containers: This technology uses a standard way to package and deploy your application\’s code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. This way, your software runs well when moved from one computing environment to another.
Commonly, containers are used to build and deploy microservices, run batch jobs for machine learning applications, and move existing applications into the cloud.
- Cloud-Native Replatforming: This approach consists of moving applications to the cloud by replacing some components. The application goes through some common modifications, such as enabling interaction with the database to benefit from automation or ensuring better scaling and utilizing reserved resources in the cloud environment.
This approach allows developers to reuse the resources they are comfortable working with, such as development frameworks or legacy programming languages.
Benefits of Legacy Modernization:
- Cost Reduction: Moving from local on-premise data centers to cloud-based solutions helps you cut down on the cost associated with data center utilities. When cloud-based data solutions offer more scalable and manageable services at affordable rates, you don’t need to spend building or managing your resources.
Even if you encounter a bug, diagnosing it on the cloud platform is relatively easy compared to on-premise servers. Since modern systems are accessible to new possibilities, you can even re-architect your legacy application with an open-source programming language. Plus, you can automate some processes as well.
- Improved Business Agility: With modernized applications, companies can efficiently serve their customers and vendors. Companies that work on legacy systems find it very hard to develop new products or features. Contrary, modernized applications ease future planning about designing new features and services.
Further, modernization application ensures better code, well-managed databases, and highly flexible applications. If your employees want to work from any part of the world, the modernized application can make it possible.
- Enhanced Team Productivity & Performance: The immediate effect you will see after modernizing legacy applications is improved team productivity. Since developers get access to better development tools and sophisticated cloud technology, it reduces efforts and enhances efficiency.
Besides this, by modernizing legacy systems, you can serve various needs of the different departments at a single time. It brings flexibility to manage resources and achieve optimum results.
- Improved Compliance and Customer Support: Non-compliance issues cost IT companies severely, as managing and updating the logs and reports becomes a big headache with paper-based legacy applications. On the other hand, modernized systems help you update records and information from anywhere, at any time.
Plus, it offers you feature like real-time data entry, increased security to advanced encryption, improved project tracking, all contribute to easy compliance, better customer support, and reduced risk.
- Better Security: Reports suggest that outdated systems are highly vulnerable to malware attacks and data breaches. Plus, the situations get even worse in the absence of support from vendors, making it a soft target to such attacks.
Since the system is outdated, you can’t rely on it even if it seemed super secure five or ten years ago. Once you modernize the legacy system, it provides better security and protection for your critical business transactions.
Services we can Offer for Legacy Applications
ThinkSys offers range of legacy application services that will take your app to the next level. From modernization to migration, our tailored solutions can revitalize your legacy applications.
1.Legacy Application Modernization
Outdated applications offer limited functionality and hamper the overall efficiency of the application. Revive your legacy application with our legacy application modernization service. We thoroughly analyze your application’s architecture, codebase, and user experience to identify areas for improvement. Through careful optimization and leveraging the latest technologies, we refactor the app to enhance its performance and scalability. Modernizing your legacy app improve operational efficiency, reduce maintenance costs, and offer a refreshed user experience to your users.
2.Legacy Application Integration
Collaboration and exchanging data between systems is crucial, especially in legacy systems. Bridge the gap between your legacy application and modern systems with legacy application integration service by ThinkSys. Whether it is integrating with web services, APIs, or third-party applications, our experts ensure smooth data exchange and workflow automation. This integration facilitates streamlined processes, improved business insights, and collaboration with the rest of your IT ecosystem.
3.Legacy Application Support & Maintenance
Maintaining and supporting a legacy application is daunting due to outdated technologies and scarce expertise. With ThinkSys’s legacy application support and maintenance service, your app will remain secure, stable, and up-to-date. Our experts continuously monitor your app to identify and fix issues to make it stable. Moreover, routine maintenance tasks ensure that it continues to provide high performance, minimizing downtime and maiming productivity.
4.Legacy Application Migration
With swift technological advancements, keeping up with the latest innovations is pivotal. Embrace this change and transition your legacy application to a modern platform or infrastructure with legacy application migration service by ThinkSys. By analyzing your application’s data structure, functionality, and dependencies, our professionals design a custom migration strategy for a smooth transition. From data transfer to maintaining data integrity, ThinkSys will handle the entire migration process with minimal business disruption.
5.Legacy Application Assessment
Before beginning any transformation journey, it’s essential to gain a comprehensive understanding of your legacy application’s strengths and weaknesses. Gain valuable insight into your app’s code quality, performance bottlenecks, architecture, security vulnerabilities, and scalability limitations with legacy application assessment service. Attaining this information will allow you to make informed decisions and pave the best path forward for your legacy application, whether modernization, migration, or integration.
6.Legacy Application Cloud Enablement
Cloud computing is a highly scalable and secure platform for legacy applications. Leverage the benefits of cloud platforms while transforming your legacy application into a cloud-native solution with legacy application cloud enablement service. Our experts will identify opportunities to utilize cloud-native technologies by analyzing your legacy app’s architecture. Based on this assessment, we re-architect your app, making it more flexible and scalable in a cloud environment. Our experts will guide you throughout the entire process.
Conclusion
Legacy applications are the most difficult things to handle in an IT organization. Since businesses can’t replace them at will, they prefer to persist with such systems.
Unfortunately, problems like security breaches, downtime, and poor customer support also impact business in other ways unless you transform the legacy application on time.
Today, different ways can help you modernize your legacy application. So it’s better to use advanced forms instead of using outdated methods.