Blog From Outdated to Transformative: Application Modernization
By Mark Candelora / 27 Oct 2022
In a recent LinkedIn Live, my colleague Ben Kotvis and I discussed the top modernization considerations for IT leaders, which you can watch here.
Understanding application modernization
Many longstanding organizations face a common challenge: maintaining legacy applications. These applications may be 10 or even 30 years old, and in that time have become increasingly expensive and troublesome to maintain. Often, cloud modernization approaches can be expensive and fail to generate value proportional to the upfront investment. Application modernization helps transform legacy apps in the quickest and most cost-effective way. With the right experts, organizations can be sure to take full advantage of the tools and technology available to them to modernize their applications and garner the highest ROI.
Diving deeper into app modernization
What organizations often lack when it comes to their app modernization journey is consultative support: They need experienced advisors who can get to know their unique business and customer needs to deliver the right solution. Legacy applications can be costly to operate and often run on unsupported technology. These applications can also have security vulnerabilities, device constraints and provide a poor user experience. Organizations should aim to scale, migrate and modernize cost-effectively, allowing them to retire their legacy apps with confidence. To ensure the transition is smooth, solution providers should break the process into stages and run tests so once the application is modernized, the outcome is transformative.
Client story: Healthcare provider gains insight into real-time information
A large healthcare provider was looking to move its existing app used by 98K nurses to Microsoft Azure for modernization purposes when it asked Insight for help. The leaders of this organization wanted a test case to prove that the new system would be a huge improvement from the current one to gain buy-in from reluctant users. Our team overhauled the back end significantly to improve dependability and reach, and developed best practices for modernization that the client could use in the future. The test was successful and left the client eager to tackle additional apps to expand its modernization. Now information on nurse performance and patient maintenance is available in real time for all nurse leaders at this organization.
Our unique approach to modernization
Insight is here across the entire journey — we have the right analysts, UI developers, engineers and strategists needed to ensure a successful app modernization project. We also offer managed services once applications are live. Our IT experts partner closely with organizations as they evaluate their data and development options before customizing a unique application modernization journey for them.
Depending on the situation, we deploy one of our R’s strategies — here are some examples:
- Retire: For systems that are hard to maintain and fail to generate value, the old system will be retired, and a new roadmap is developed.
- Rehost: Prepare a new landing zone and prepare the cloud and infrastructure to be executed in parallel.
- Refactor: Align and plan changes, update and/or consolidate code, and redeploy.
- Re-envision: Align, plan, design, develop and release an entirely new app.
Looking for more insight into modernization?
If you’re looking for more information about cloud-native approaches to application modernization, here are some of our favorite resources:
- To learn more about application modernization, you can watch this video.
- For more information about challenges to modernization, check out this video.
- To see the Insight advantage for cloud-native apps, watch this video.
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Mark Candelora
Sr. Manager, Engineering, Connected Platform, Insight
Mark pairs the right technology to your needs, designing and building solutions that advance your business. He has specialties in database development, analysis, reporting, data warehousing, and business intelligence. Mark helps clients distill and transform complex data to inform critical decisions. His project history reflects a keen ability to build high-performing global solutions.
