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From Legacy to Leading-Edge: Your App Modernisation Journey

September 18, 2024

Since the 1990s, organisations and businesses have relied heavily on software applications, delivering a fundamental shift in how they operated and interacted with customers and users through the ubiquity of the internet and personal computing devices. In the 2000s, the advent of cloud computing, mobile applications, and big data analytics was transformational, with software becoming integral to nearly every aspect of business operations, from supply chain management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Today, software underpins nearly every function in every industry, driving automation, efficiency, and innovation. This transformation continues as businesses increasingly adopt artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced technologies.

However, many enterprises face challenges not only in developing new software products but also in maintaining their legacy application portfolios, which are crucial for daily operations.

Application modernisation offers a way to reimagine and transform these legacy applications for cloud delivery. By modernising your enterprise applications to become cloud-native, you can significantly enhance your operating model and achieve impactful outcomes.

Organisations pursue application modernisation for various reasons:

• Enhance customer experiences.
• Boost customer engagement with transformed products or services.
• Develop new technical capabilities.
• Scale to meet market and geographical demands.
• Disrupt the market with innovative products or services.
• Reduce development costs.
• Increase application agility.

The application modernisation path is an excellent route not only for modernisation but also for innovation. It provides the opportunity to move your applications to the cloud while leveraging the benefits of cloud hosting and developing purely cloud-native applications. Organisations should now consider innovation as a key component of their cloud strategy.

Application modernisation can be approached in various ways, depending on the organisation’s needs, the expected ROI, and the available timescales.

While many organisations focus on Lift & Shift or Containerisation approaches, we recommend moving applications to be cloud-native. This can be as simple as rehosting, but it can also involve re-architecting and recoding to utilise modern architectures such as microservices. Transitioning to cloud-native applications delivers all the best features of the cloud, often at the lowest price point.

At Black Marble, we specialise in guiding organisations through app modernisation, from providing top level guidance and architecture, to delivering with your in-house teams, right down to hands-in-the-plumbing, ground-up development. Contact us to find out how your organisation can benefit from our years of experience in the field.