Running legacy technologies
Many business organizations run businesses for decades by adapting to rapid changes in the technology landscape. Most of the enterprises do businesses enabled by various applications running on legacy technologies. Certain challenges keep businesses running on most of these legacy technologies. With the use of legacy technologies comes the need for its modernization. The whole process gets referred to as Legacy Application Modernization.
Comparison between business & technology drivers
All business drivers provide growth opportunities in new markets that take into consideration the evolving customer-behaviors and preferences. Undoubtedly there is an increased competitive pressure with the advent of new standards in regulatory & compliance. There is a proactive investment to fight disruption & decline in business performance.
Technology drivers focus on improving the outdated ones to keep technological support open to all businesses. The total cost of IT & operations is dependent on evolving employee behaviors and preferences. Retiring SMEs and skill scarcity in the market along with lack of expertise, literacy & understanding of digital trends are the challenges that drive innovations in modern technological sectors.
Both business & technology drivers are taken into consideration for the entire process of legacy application modernization. According to recent reports, a majority of legacy applications continue to serve critical business needs for business enterprises. Challenges galore when it comes to the legacy application modernization process.
Challenges
Knowledge Deficit
Instances in which developers work in different organizations or no longer in touch with the applications. The functional & technical documentation is missing or not up-to-date. Either the source code is heavily patched or libraries/third-party applications are unused/unavailable.
Heavy Legacy Eco-system
In the case of businesses, a plethora of applications are in use, and updating these existing legacy applications is not simple. Modernizing the entire legacy footprint impacts businesses heavily as well. A chunking approach gets followed in these cases with critical ones taken into consideration first before handling the rest. Certain tools & applications get designed for enabling the process of legacy application modernization. Once all legacy applications get modernized, the footprint gets turned off.
Quality assurance & Performance achievement
All possible test scenarios & cases get well-defined ahead of the testing phase. The user acceptance test gets planned as well for ensuring a better quality of the whole modernization process. One of the success factors is to involve all business users right from phase one (application discovery) for maintaining an effective quality assurance process. An effective performance achievement gets done through data migration between various small phases within the legacy applications.
Conclusion
The modernized methodology offers a wide variety of tools that help in navigating through the challenges we saw in this discussion.
Comments