Re-writing or replatforming legacy applications effectively is not easy. Engineers should be confident when working with containers, serverless architecture, and cloud solutions. They should understand the end-to-end process of auditing existing applications, mapping dependencies, projecting costs, and building project plans on timelines that make sense.
By Kevin Epstein
Trying to Modernize the Entire Code Base at Once
Another common pitfall we see is business leaders and teams failing to prioritize their modernization projects. In general, we recommend starting with a smaller Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for a non-critical application or feature. A PoC is a great opportunity to test the process, identify any skill gaps on the team, and ensure cloud readiness. After a successful PoC, it’s up to decision-makers to prioritize the rest of the roadmap according to the needs and capabilities of the business.
Business stakeholders should be included in modernization conversations from the beginning. After all, the point of modernizing legacy applications is to generate positive results for the business, not just to achieve better technical performance.
Forgetting to Align with Business Stakeholders
Related to the point above, application modernizations have the potential to impact enterprise strategy more broadly. Modern applications allow engineers to focus more on innovation and feature development. They create budget capacity for team leaders and enable companies to iterate faster based on customer feedback.
By breaking down modernization projects, involving the right people, and ensuring all parts of the organization are aligned, businesses can navigate these common pitfalls and unlock greater value from their IT investments.
Neglecting to Prioritize
It’s tempting to want to modernize an entire legacy codebase. However, we don’t recommend this approach, especially if your team is less experienced with application modernizations. Modernizations are complex projects, and the larger the codebase, the longer the modernization journey takes to get right, which introduces significantly more risk. Engineers can miss critical dependencies and underestimate the difficulty of optimizing for the cloud.
Modernizing legacy applications has the potential to create tremendous value for your business. Modern applications scale more easily and deliver value faster to end users. They are also easier to maintain and more cost-efficient when configured correctly. Yet, there are many ways that the modernization journey can go wrong.
Ignoring the Need to Acquire the Right Skills
Everyone involved in maintaining modern applications – DevOps engineers, platform engineers, cloud engineers, software engineers, and business stakeholders – should agree on what tools are needed and what processes would accelerate software delivery. Getting everyone on the same page unlocks the true value of modernized applications.
Modernizing legacy applications offers significant advantages, such as improved scalability, faster value delivery, and reduced maintenance costs. However, the journey can be riddled with challenges that, if not properly addressed, can derail the process.
Failing to Include Modernization in the Broader Org Strategy
This could mean modernizing applications in order of least critical to most crucial for the business to gain more experience. It could also mean starting with the most outdated applications that would see the biggest jump in performance. Every business will prioritize differently, but what’s most important is that the group goes through a rationalization and prioritization exercise.
And teams should know how to continually optimize applications on the cloud through performance monitoring, robust access controls, proper configurations, and much more. When crucial modernization skills don’t exist in-house, businesses should bring in outside expertise to guide the project.
Overlooking the People, Processes, and Tooling Alignment
As a result, app modernizations should be included in the larger conversation about what the organization can achieve in both the short and long term. Leaving modernizations out of business strategy discussions is a missed opportunity.
Here are the six most common modernization pitfalls we see as an experienced provider of application modernization services.
Get Started with Modernizing Your Legacy Applications
Business stakeholders bring an important perspective to the conversation that should be incorporated into prioritization efforts. Application modernizations should happen within the context of a goal that puts the business in a better position to serve customers, deliver services, and grow.
The worst-case scenario is businesses experience extended downtime when trying to make the transition. The better approach is to break a larger modernization project up into much smaller pieces.
Maximizing application performance requires giving talented people high-quality tools within well-defined processes. If one of these dimensions is not aligned with the other two, or all three are implemented in isolation without consideration for the others, business applications won’t reach their full potential.
