by Abin Thomas, on Jul 9, 2020 5:37:13 PM
COVID-19 has disrupted the demand-supply chain and triggered technological exigencies across verticals. As enterprises embrace latest technologies and complete digitization through the pandemic, a consistent technology upgrade for archaic applications and software has become imperative for imminent business continuity.
In this blog, we will discuss the pivotal role of application modernization through COVID along with its fundamental components that need immediate adoption for a sustainable progression of enterprises.
What is Application Modernization?
Application Modernization is an umbrella term that involves systematic technology upgrades and implementations in legacy applications with a view to scale, optimize, and build resilience across business processes. It doesn’t necessarily mean building applications from scratch. However, it keeps the original DNA of the software intact while making necessary or recommended improvements in it. The entire concept of app modernization underpins the fact that applications built in a particular timeframe or for a certain situation might become less efficient or even obsolete with time in a progressive and dynamic consumer ecosystem powered by high-end technologies.
How does application modernization become critical for enterprises during and post COVID?
COVID-19 has brought about a radical change in how businesses operate and deliver to consumer expectations. Intertwined with a transformed array of consumer needs that now span across social distancing and contactless workplace needs of employees as well as clientele, enterprises have geared up for an exhaustively digitized world. This new normal demands robust, resilient, and cost-effective software systems with minimal external dependencies like on-premise work collaboration or hardware resources. Moreover, certain industries have experienced a sudden surge in demand while others have taken a hit in terms of scale and deliverability. Enterprises that were earlier providing services to their regular 10,000 customers on a monthly basis will need a scalable application that can take up an unprecedented surge as well as a plunge in business without necessarily incurring losses.
Telemedicine, for instance, has observed a sudden surge in the number of users which means that applications in healthcare must brace for exponential growth in the user base. This in turn might require re-coding, re-platforming, re-factoring, re-hosting re-architecting, re-building etc of the legacy infrastructure of healthcare apps that were earlier operating hyper locally.
Food ordering and hospitality businesses will require new GPS powered modules that can help them in identifying areas that are infected by a pandemic and quickly stop catering to these areas.
Enterprises that have their employees working remotely will need new software and tools with better and efficient functionalities like daily reporting, timeline monitoring for tasks, etc.
The bottom line being that application modernization has become critical to enterprises of all scales and domains, it is just a matter of what technology upgrades your enterprise needs and how you can achieve it. Let us have a look at some critical elements of application modernization that enterprises can use to gauge their pandemic readiness.
Critical Elements of Application Modernization
The immediate repercussion of the post COVID lockdown period on enterprises is their inability to deliver tangible business value with their legacy applications, not made for scale, intermittent troubleshooting, and disaster recovery. All development projects need an uplift that implements essential components of application modernization that were earlier crucial but have now become inevitable for sustenance:
- IaC or Infrastructure as code:
Modern applications need to be free of bugs and highly resilient to faults. They also need to be salable on demand. This problem can be solved by using a number of public clouds service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba cloud which have tools that can automate the installation and configuring of fresh application instances. They can also redirect the traffic to different instances whenever a certain application component fails. - Microservices architecture with Self-sufficient development teams: Microservices enable multiple workflows across modules without disrupting others. This architecture needs deeper roots across verticals. Each module can be allotted one team with 6 to 8 members. This team takes care of a certain microservice, including everything from coding and design to release and instructing the operations team. This team includes full-stack, polyglot engineers, a product owner, along with a product manager.
- Implement DevOps practices:
Often teams might struggle to get code on production or troubleshoot effectively given a remote working environment and lack of visibility. DevOps will play a huge role in these areas. A framework that deploys, tests, and releases the revised code to production using an automated and repeatable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is the need of the hour. The entire pipeline can be simplified with the help of monitoring, dashboards, and logging with request correlation. With DevOps, the application release cycle can be reduced considerably. - Agile Approach:
Agile needs to be an evergreen concept in development. Pandemic has created an urgency for enterprises to move from a rigid linear sequence to an agile driven development environment in response to changing customer desires, business needs, and technology. When modernizing the financial compliance application, the focus needs to be on one business objective: scaling to accommodate increased or decreased transaction processing load. Following this, the components of monolithic code can be replaced with microservices.
Conclusion
Staying afloat as a business in a post-COVID-19 world will need accelerated pace of application modernization as well as digitization. As you go forward, analyze where your business stands and what it requires to get back on track or possibly reach new growth levels with technology. Cloud, microservices, and DevOps are just a part of what is possible with the myriad of technologies and pre-defined development practices based on experiences and expertise. Rapid delivery of quality code to meet changing customer desires and business needs is imperative through these tough times. Make sure you avail it at all costs. Speak to our expert today, if you need help on app modernization services
