Seize the Application Modernization Opportunity

If your customers have been in business for more than a few years, they are likely to have processes and systems in need of digital transformation. Sure, the pandemic forced acceleration plans for many, but today there are still many areas in need of an IT makeover. Consider the applications your customers use. Simply put, most legacy applications weren’t built to deal with the amount of data collected and stored today. As a result, there’s a significant opportunity for application modernization.

Why Application Modernization?

Legacy applications are often holding businesses back due to their limitations. It’s also incredibly time consuming and costly to support legacy applications. For example, the greater part of the IT-related federal budget of the United States ($80 billion) goes to maintaining legacy systems. Application modernization is the process of advancing these solutions to support the needs of a modern business today. Modern applications introduce efficiencies and increase workplace productivity while maintaining IT budgets at reasonable levels.

What Is Application Modernization?

Application modernization can include newer platforms, programming languages and frameworks. Legacy applications can be clunky, rigid and inseparable from existing systems. Instead of retiring old systems, more is being done by looking at the application itself and re-engineering it to run on multiple platforms and clouds. This enables organizations to extend the lifecycle of their systems, as well as have a more agile approach to where and on what they run modern applications.

Recipe for Application Modernization

Modernizing applications relies on four critical technology solutions and capabilities:

1. Microservices: Microservices technology is a decentralized horizontal approach to modern application development. Microservices separate functions of code into different segments. These functions of code rely on APIs, which allow the application to run across multiple platforms rather than distinct systems and architecture. The API-driven model enables applications to run across distributed systems rather than a single platform and often leverages the cloud. The microservices architecture allows applications to run across multiple public, private or hybrid clouds. The API-driven model within the microservices architecture is known as the cloud-native approach, since much of this approach originated in cloud services.
2. Containers: Containers are a method for packaging, deploying, and operating applications and workloads. A modern application is segmented into microservices—a decentralized and horizontal approach—by deploying code functions and wrapping images in containers. Containers can help spread workloads across multiple systems, are a very efficient way to deploy applications, and can help reduce architecture costs as they are lean and efficient. They are also more scalable than traditional virtual workloads and virtualized applications we see today that often drag along a clunky operating system within the conventional VM.
3. Cloud computing: Cloud computing is essential to running modernized applications. Modern applications are designed to run across multiple clouds and distributed systems across different varieties of architecture. This includes private, hybrid and public cloud architectures.
4. Orchestration and automation: Orchestration and automation are critical in managing modernized application architecture. Microservices and containers solve many problems; however, they also invite new complexities in the environment that need to be automated and managed. In addition, container architecture can involve thousands of containers that need to be managed and orchestrated. Therefore, a software-defined data center or cloud is essential to modernized applications.

Build Your Application Modernization Practice

 Solution providers can build a practice around application modernization in a variety of areas. For example, customers may need help migrating to microservices and containers. They may also need assistance with public, private or hybrid cloud deployments. It’s also possible to help customers automate their data centers to host modern applications. Additionally, most applications have end customer-facing interfaces that run on mobile computers, tablets or PCs. Combined, these opportunities are vast and can have a significant impact on your business. In short, don’t miss out on the lucrative opportunity to modernize your customers’ applications.

 This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.