6 benefits of expediting your application modernisation

Businesses are looking constantly for new ways to improve the efficiency of their organisation.

Embracing cloud technology has been one of those methods. At the core of moving to the cloud is the process of application modernisation as many business applications are still running on-premise.  

But there is no better time to modernise those applications than now. Previously, the only way to modernise your applications was to completely rip and replace or keep the old applications through virtualisation or introducing APIs.

But application modernisation has come a long way since then and it takes only a few steps to complete. Not only is it beneficial for the bottom line, but it will also help future-proof your business for years to come. It’s particularly crucial in this fast-paced world in which we live.

Let’s take a closer look at the six main benefits of why it’s important to consider prioritising your application modernisation project today.

1. Be more agile and flexible

Back in the day, deploying on-premise applications was a time-consuming and complex process because these were supported by monolithic environments that involved a lot of dependencies. By contrast, modern applications have limited dependencies and are usually broken into multiple workloads or microservices. This means updates and upgrades can happen faster, with limited or no downtime. Being able to respond at speed is beneficial particularly when your business is trying to keep up with market demand for new services.

‍2. Improve customer experience

There’s nothing like having a competitive advantage in an increasingly saturated market. Modernising applications is one way to get there because when you have the agility and flexibility to respond to customer demand, it means you can create new features that customers are after, whether that’s building new interfaces or even spinning up new applications. This will help your businesses remain aligned with current business needs and future goals.

3. Increase revenue stream

In addition to improving customer experience, when you’re able to add new features as a result of application modernisation, your business will see a lift in revenue. Unfortunately, existing legacy systems cannot offer the same flexibility as it isn’t as easy for a business to implement new changes.

4. Reduce costs

Maintaining legacy applications on-premise can be a costly exercise. Those costs are often associated with resource usage, licensing and hiring the right skills for ongoing maintenance. But if you were to modernise your applications, these costly headaches will disappear. Plus, once you modernise your applications, being able to spin one up will be equally as easy to shut one down.

5. Get rid of technical debt

Over time, legacy systems become so complex that companies often lose track of just how much “technical debt” they accumulate. It’s only until they really take a good hard look at their application systems does this come to light. But a key step of application modernisation forces you to assess exactly how many applications exist on your system, where there are opportunities to retire applications that you no longer need, or where you can decouple your applications and remove built-up complexity.

6. Address security concerns

The unfortunate problem faced by all businesses in today's world is that security threats are constant and increasingly sophisticated. However, when you look under the hood of businesses with existing on-premise applications you’ll often see that those applications have failed to be updated regularly and that it leaves those applications – along with your business – completely vulnerable to potential threat actors. However, moving your applications to a cloud-base environment will force businesses to build security from the beginning, particularly when existing cloud-native applications offer top-line security features that not only offer the necessary protection, but are time and cost-saving.

_{*This blog is sourced from acquired company Fronde.}‍