Application Modernisation
Modernising applications involves strategically moving apps to cloud-based and/or cloud native infrastructures. Cloud computing offers numerous advantages, including cost-efficiency, resilience, scalability, and easy access to a wide range of managed services. This decision is an important step to driving business agility and essential for digital transformation.
Utilising the approach known as the R’s of migration during the cloud assessment & strategy development phase, the consulting team will decide which applications need to be Rehosted, Replatformed, Rearchitected, Recoded and Retired.
Application Modernisation (App Mod) is the refactoring or rearchitecting of an application. Refactoring involves making changes to the application’s codebase in order to align it with cloud or cloud native principles. This could include breaking the application into microservices, changing how state is managed, using containerisation, and adopting serverless architectures in order to optimise performance as well as leverage the native elasticity of the cloud.
App Mod
Security Improvements
Older applications may have vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Modernisation provides an opportunity to enhance security measures and implement the latest security protocols, safeguarding sensitive data and protecting against potential threats.
Support for Mobile Devices
As the use of mobile devices continues to grow, businesses need applications that are compatible with various platforms and screen sizes. Modernising applications can make them responsive and mobile-friendly.
Future Proof
Technology continues to evolve rapidly, and applications that are not regularly updated can become obsolete or prohibitively expensive to maintain. Either scenario undermines business profitability. Modernisation ensures that applications remain relevant and adaptable to future technological advancements, protecting the longevity of the business.
Legacy System Replacement & Cloud Native Tech
Many businesses rely on legacy systems that are no longer supported or updated. These become expensive to maintain and expose the organisation to significant cybersecurity risks. Modernisation provides an opportunity to replace these systems with more robust and up-to-date solutions.
Enhanced Performance & Scalability
Modernising applications enables businesses to take advantage of the latest technologies and architectures, resulting in improved performance and scalability. This can lead to better user experiences, significant cost reductions, and increased efficiency in handling growing workloads.
Compliance & Regulation
In many industries, compliance with data protection and regulatory standards is essential. Modernising applications can help businesses meet these evolving stringent requirements more effectively and avoid potential penalties.
Improved User Experience
Modernised applications are often more intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing. This can lead to higher user satisfaction, increased user retention as well as conversion rate, and positive brand perception.
Competitive Advantage
Businesses that modernise their applications can gain a competitive edge in the market. They can deliver new features and services faster, respond to customer needs more effectively, and adapt to market changes swiftly.
Cost Management
Outdated applications can be costly to maintain, often requiring specialised skills and expensive hardware alongside punitive legacy licensing models. By modernising applications, businesses can streamline operations, optimise resource usage, and reduce maintenance costs.
Ability to Integrate
Modern applications are designed to be more flexible and open to integration with other systems as well as services. This allows businesses to create connected ecosystems that facilitate data flow and collaboration across different applications, in turn creating richer data sets.
Containerisation
During application modernisation, containerisation allows businesses to update legacy systems and enables the migration of these applications to modern environments without the burden of reworking the entire codebase.
Containerisation as a methodology is the strategic encapsulation of applications and their dependencies into portable and isolated containers. This approach enhances agility, scalability, and consistency in the deployment process. Moreover, it facilitates the seamless integration of new features and technologies, while also enabling the application to run efficiently on cloud platforms.
In the context of refactoring, containerisation enables developers to break monolithic applications into microservices or domain specific services. In turn, these containers promote increased maintainability, seamless scalability, easier updates, and continuous delivery.
Containers streamline the development workflow, as they provide a consistent environment for developers across different stages of the application lifecycle.
Ultimately, containerisation fosters a more robust and flexible approach to software development, paving the way for innovation and faster time-to-market for modern applications.
Kubernetes is a dominant open-source container orchestration platform. It provides powerful tools for managing containerised applications, automating deployment, scaling, and monitoring. Its robust features, such as automatic load balancing, rolling updates, and self-healing capabilities, ensure high availability as well as fault tolerance.
Kubernetes simplifies the complexities of container management, enabling businesses to efficiently utilise resources, streamline application development, and build scalable, resilient, as well as cloud-native applications with ease.
Serverless
Serverless computing, on the other hand, has become increasingly popular for its ability to enable highly scalable and flexible applications, providing a game-changing solution for modern software development. It is ideal for solutions that require high levels of scalability while providing the cost efficiencies of a fully elastic environment.
The serverless approach enables developers to build and deploy applications without the need to manage underlying servers or infrastructure, as the compute is fully managed by the cloud provider. This allows developers to focus solely on writing code while the provider delivers majority of the requirements around support services and infrastructure management.
Serverless services empowers developers to build scalable, event-driven applications seamlessly. Users can run code in response to various triggers, such as HTTP requests, database changes, or file uploads. Moreover, its integration abilities allow for the facilitation, the creation and management of APIs. A good illustration would be the leveraging of AWS services similar to Lambda and API Gateway. This combination enables businesses to achieve rapid development, reduced operational overhead, and cost efficiency.