Legacy apps are not built for the cloud and are often obstacles to innovation, user experience and cost management.
When it comes to digital transformation, nearly 70% of organizations rate user experience as a top priority; however, only about a third of those organizations have a mature application modernization practice.
When applications are moved to Azure, they often require modernization, including refactoring or rearchitecting to take advantage of modern microservice architectures and cloud services such as Container Instances, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Functions and Service Fabric.
App modernization transforms legacy software into a cloud-native application, empowering businesses to take full advantage of Azure for flexible, scalable and cost-effective development and application hosting. However, application modernization poses numerous challenges for businesses that lack resources or cloud experience, And, organizations need teams with the expertise to evaluate and prioritize modernization activities.
Learn more below about the challenges of modernizing legacy applications.
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Designing Applications for the Cloud
Modernizing a legacy application for the cloud often means dividing a monolith into microservices that can be scaled and managed independently using Azure’s many compute and storage services. However, without a deep understanding of their application, the cloud user experience, and the Azure platform, businesses struggle to design application architectures that optimize performance, availability, and cost.
Controlling App Modernization Costs
Application modernization helps businesses to reduce cloud costs by using Azure’s services more efficiently. However, Azure is a complex platform with many specialized services, each of which has performance and cost tradeoffs.
Businesses often fail to achieve their cost objectives. They don’t follow app modernization best practices or appreciate the challenges inherent in modernizing application architectures for microservice and containers. The result is “cloud-native†apps that cost more, increase complexity, and perform worse than expected
Adapting To Cloud-Native Workflows
Application modernization is an opportunity for workflow modernization. But transitioning to DevOps workflows, decentralized development, and continuous integration/delivery entails a significant evolution in company culture and tooling. For businesses entrenched in more traditional approaches, app modernization may present significant technology, staffing, and management challenges.
App Modernization Skills Gaps
Legacy app migration and modernization demand knowledge and skills that an organization may not possess in-house. A disruption-free modernization depends on detailed knowledge of the app, how it is used, and its dependencies. It also requires a comprehensive understanding of Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure and related services. Without app modernization experience and platform expertise, a business may fail to achieve their modernization goals after substantial investment.