It’s inevitable that legacy applications will require modernisation at some stage — whether it’s migrating to the cloud, adding new functionality, improving performance and security, or to facilitate modern integration approaches. 

The best legacy modernisation approach depends on the problem. The first thing you need to be clear of is: what are you trying to solve?

Modernising legacy applications 

Often legacy IT investments still have value, and components can be reused. So as an alternative to just ‘throwing everything out and starting again’, you can modernise applications and the user experience without having to discard all the underlying systems. 

Maintaining legacy systems has the potential to cause security risks, inefficiency, unpredictability, and lack of insights and information. 

Legacy modernisation is about using and reusing applications and taking past strengths and combining them with the opportunities that current technologies present.

Gartner’s 7 approaches to legacy modernisation

According to Gartner (2019), there are 7 approaches to legacy modernisation, this includes the following:

1. Encapsulate. Leverage and extend the application features by encapsulating its data and functions, making them available as services via an API. 
2. Rehost. Redeploy the application component to other infrastructure (physical, virtual or cloud) without modifying its code, features or functions. 
3. Replatform. Migrate to a new runtime platform, making minimal changes to the code, but not the code structure, features or functions. 
4. Refactor. Restructure and optimise the existing code (although not its external behavior) to remove technical debt and improve nonfunctional attributes. 
5. Rearchitect. Materially alter the code to shift it to a new application architecture and exploit new and better capabilities.  
6. Rebuild. Redesign or rewrite the application component from scratch while preserving its scope and specifications. 
7. Replace. Eliminate the former application component altogether and replace it, considering new requirements and needs at the same time. 

We modernize legacy applications to meet today’s business needs and deliver great user experiences. Contact us to find out what approach best suits your organization.

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