As businesses accelerate digital transformation, legacy applications (and their underlying infrastructure) stall innovation. The key to retaining customer engagement lies in the modernization of these applications to align with evolving user requirements.
In the contemporary landscape, users demand applications that are user-friendly. They want enhanced access and expect an exceptional user experience. Consequently, the performance of your application must accommodate shifting customer expectations. The process of modernizing your applications serves the dual purpose of remaining pertinent in the market and sustaining revenue growth.
Today, many leading technology companies distance themselves from legacy technologies. In a competitive environment, it is imperative for your company to improve and stand out. Proactively planning for the future means pursuing digital transformation through native cloud applications.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is the process of modernizing your existing on-premise apps to meet current business needs. To achieve this, you must update legacy apps to flexible cloud environments using modern technology stacks.
However, modernizing applications isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. The app modernization process depends entirely on the level of upgrade and optimization required to meet business goals and expected ROI. For some, the process may be straightforward and simple. For others, unexpected challenges and roadblocks could arise that need the knowledge necessary to overcome them.
The app modernization process ranges from simply re-hosting (lift-and-shift) on-premise apps to the cloud to advanced composing and refactoring of monolithic applications. Therefore, when the call to modernize certain apps arises, you should decide whether a simple facelift will achieve the desired results or if you need a complete re-architecture of an app to utilize the full potential of the cloud.
Modernizing Apps With a Cloud-Native Approach
While it’s possible to lift and shift apps without heavy re-coding, the real value of modernization comes from building your app from scratch for ‘cloud-native’ environments. A cloud-native app is an application built using modern cloud technologies. Additionally, each service of a cloud-native app is managed on flexible infrastructure using agile DevOps processes.
With cloud-native development, teams can also build and maintain loosely coupled microservices independently. They can roll out new updates and features to an app quickly and automatically without disrupting the end users’ experience. Let’s take a look at some of the other business benefits of cloud-native applications.
The Benefits of Cloud-Native Applications
Faster Time-to-Market
Cloud-native tools and DevOps processes help accelerate the overall development time of cloud-native applications. The ability to independently deploy microservices means teams can push new updates and features incrementally and automatically to the app. This independence has a direct impact on development time and can cut down time-to-market from weeks to hours.
Autoscaling
Cloud-native apps use auto scaling to create instances for microservices that are needed to handle the demand. Meaning the app dynamically scales resources up or down and adjusts to the varying load without manual intervention. Autoscaling also supports a better user experience. With autoscaling, end users do not face performance lag or service loss.
Automation
The cloud-native development approach facilitates cloud automation through orchestration engines such as Kubernetes. This allows you to automate testing, deployments, security, scaling, managing microservices, and even cloud infrastructure management. As a result, you are able to release the app faster while having better control over IT resources.
Resiliency
Cloud-native apps are resilient to failures by leveraging disaster recovery and automated failover features in the cloud. If there is trouble, the app handles the outage automatically, and the processing shifts to another data center immediately. With users depending on your app working as intended, features like this can ensure they always have a positive experience.
Lower Costs
There are many reasons why cloud-native apps are cost-efficient:
- Numerous cloud-native tools allow uniformity of tooling and infrastructure, leading to lower prices.
- Containerization makes it easy to manage and secure apps independently of the underlying infrastructure.
- Open-source models of cloud-native architecture allow you to find multiple vendors who offer support for the same technology, preventing you from getting locked into one vendor or at high prices.
- Capabilities like serverless computing offer a pay-per-use model, enabling you to run dynamic workloads with flexible pricing.
- Serverless computing also has indirect cost savings resulting from resiliency and reduced downtime through automated redundancy, loosely coupled services, fault-tolerance, and auto-recovery mechanisms of the cloud-native architecture.
Cloud-native applications are designed to be agile and flexible. They offer a high degree of automation, allowing organizations to gain a competitive edge through the resulting efficiency. In many cases, they are a great way for businesses to accomplish internal and customer-facing tasks faster and easier than manually.
Accelerating Digital Transformation With Xperity
Digital transformation is often laborious, difficult, and demanding. Additionally, you may face unexpected roadblocks and challenges along the way. Yet, you don’t have time for delays and navigating the unknowns.
Software development teams at Xperity are experienced in managing app modernization obstacles and completing projects to meet client expectations.
Our resources also have the industry knowledge to understand and guide businesses in realizing the full benefits of cloud-native features. Whether it’s about re-hosting on-premise apps, building independent microservices, or developing cloud-native apps, the experts at Xperity have extensive industry domain experience and a strong cloud partner ecosystem that you can leverage to modernize business applications.
Bring your apps to market faster, accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, and drive business growth with access to a comprehensive technology toolbox and a world-class team of software engineers.
Learn more about how Xperity can help you modernize apps by contacting us today.
