Most established enterprises carry the baggage of years – often decades – of incremental IT development, with applications developed at different times with different technologies to address different problems.

It’s easy to see why it’s important for your organization’s applications to be modernized to keep up with your business and the world outside. As you consider the way forward, a good place to start would be to ask yourself these questions.

1. Why?

In most situations, “Why?” is a good place to initiate a thought process. When it comes to application modernization as well, it’s important to understand the problems that currently exist, or the benefits that you would like to tap into, which would make modernization of your application necessary.

So ask yourself,

• Are the existing legacy applications slow to respond?
• Is it proving difficult to make updates/upgrades when required?
• Do your legacy applications play well with newer apps?
• Can your legacy apps run smoothly on modern cloud infra?
• Are there new feature requirements that make app modernization necessary?

Answering these questions can help address the basic consideration of whether an application modernization project would be of benefit to the business.

2. How critical?

Having answered the “why”, the next consideration is whether the modernization of your application is a must-have, or a nice-to-have. Having a newly modernized application does sound like an obvious choice, but there are multiple factors to consider, including smooth operations,  positive customer experience, and financial benefit.

Therefore, it’s important to ask,

• Are your legacy applications resulting directly or indirectly in business losses?
• Are customers or internal stakeholders negatively impacted by your application?
• What would be the impact of application downtime on your business?
• Does the existing application fully satisfy current and likely feature requirements?

Based on your answers to these questions, you should be able to assess any negative impact that your legacy app is having on your business, and the extent to which this will be addressed through modernization.

3. How difficult?

The first two questions should give you a clear answer as to whether your organization needs to modernize your application or not. But then there are practical considerations in terms of the challenges that the application modernization process will throw up. It is important to carefully consider your business’ operational, organizational, and financial capacity to manage a project of this nature.

Ask yourself,

• How much will the modernization project cost, and can you budget for it?
• Do you have the internal expertise required to define and manage such a project?
• Do you have an organization- or team-wide buy-in on the project, and the new processes it will bring in to the system?
• Are your IT team and IT infrastructure prepped to handle your modernized application?

This will help you to identify likely problem areas and mitigate the impact of these issues on the business.

Application Modernization is a deeply involved process, and needs to be driven by business considerations every bit as much as by IT. At CloudNow, we specialize in solving business problems with modern technology. Talk to us today to see how we can help you discover better business value from your legacy applications.