Modernizing Legacy Applications

Older legacy systems and legacy applications are crucial to a business’s functionality. They’re the backbone that holds a business together, whether they are a bank’s mainframe holding customer accounts, a factory’s SAP system handling inventory and payroll, or a retail company’s POS system for in-store sales.

As technology advances, these applications must be upgraded or replaced to keep up with the competition.

Upgrading your legacy systems will make your company more efficient, resilient to threats, and scalable. This results in a significant bump in cost savings from reduced hardware and maintenance expenses, plus a better user experience for both employees using the system and customers.

To upgrade, though, you need to make a big decision. Do you migrate your entire system or upgrade/modernize the one you currently have?

Each has significant pros and cons, and it’s key to understand both before you make your decision.

Legacy Application Migrations

First, let’s talk about migrating your legacy applications.

Migrating means moving your data to a new environment, such as a cloud platform or a new system. Having a data architect on hand for this engagement helps reduce risk and improves the rate of a successful migration.

The immediate benefit of doing this is getting a fresh start with all the benefits the new platform has to offer.

It’s a complete overhaul that will jumpstart your company and allow it to benefit from cutting-edge technology immediately.

Because it’s a complete overhaul, though, there can be some pitfalls that you must be aware of.

First and foremost, migrating your data and systems is a considerable project. Old data often needs to be reformatted for new systems, as it was written in old code or is for outdated relational databases. Your data migration can be accomplished by refactoring or completely rewriting the data, which may take longer.

Add to this the investment in new software and training, and you have a more expensive, long-term project ahead of you.

Fortunately, the long-term benefits of migrating your system outweigh any cost you may have upfront.

The return on investment from a core business system migration has been shown to pay itself off quickly after adoption. For instance, organizations that migrated to Atlassian’s cloud technology reported an ROI of 155% over three years, with an initial payback period of only six months.

Furthermore, with detailed planning, you can prevent business disruptions and data loss during migration.

To prevent business disruption, the new system should be rolled out gradually during non-peak hours to minimize the impact. Several layers of data backup and heightened security now exist to guarantee the safety of customer and company data. A data architect is crucial to executing your go-live and rollback scenarios smoothly.

Application Modernization for Legacy Applications

When it comes to modernization for legacy applications, you’ll have a quicker turnaround to upgrade your system without a complete overhaul and the full benefits of migration.

Think of migration as buying a new car, while modernization is tuning up your old one.

Because of the project’s smaller scale, modernization mitigates any setbacks that may accompany a migration.

You’re keeping your old system, so you’ll save money on new software and training because it is familiar. Modernization focuses on small, gradual changes that allow you to keep your systems running while improvements are made.

The major drawback is that modernization has a smaller return on investment than migration. You won’t have access to all the benefits a totally new platform can offer.

In addition, as your system becomes increasingly outdated, you may eventually need to migrate to a new system. Modernization can delay this, but migration may one day become inevitable.

Making Your Decision Between the Two

Regardless of your choice in managing your legacy applications, data architects or database administrators should be part of your team to ensure your selection is executed correctly.

To make your decision between migration and modernization, see where you lie on the following two questions:

1. What are your current needs? If your current system can’t keep up with your growth or you eventually want to scale, migration would be your way forward. Modernization is your choice if your current situation works but needs minor improvements.
2. What’s your long-term plan and budget? Migration will require more upfront costs, but it has proven to return much more on its investment than modernization. Modernization is less cost-heavy upfront, can be implemented faster, and will deliver short-term improvements.

If you are unsure of any of these questions and need better insight into the best path forward, ProcureSQL can help. We are happy to chat with you one-on-one, or you can contact us today by clicking here to get started on your path to migration or modernization.