A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
The agility of modern startups allows them to pivot fast, changing strategic direction, and then systems, with a speed that is impossible for industry incumbents to match.
Businesses need to be able to harness their deep knowledge and expertise and apply it to modern problems. And they need their software systems to be able to adapt to these changes. The way that legacy applications are built makes this near-impossible; solutions are to either add new features or rearchitect. But what if there was another approach?
“By 2025, 60% of new SaaS designs will support both the UI-first and API-first access, making preparedness for composability a common cloud application trait.” - Gartner
Using a three-phase Renew, Rebuild, and Replatform approach to enterprise modernization across the internal and external application landscape, organizations can build application infrastructure that is agile by design. Plus, this approach increases the odds of your modernization success and business continuity is supported along the way.
McKinsey’s Global Survey reports “69% of top performers in digital transformation say that they will achieve their strategic aspirations through differentiated digital tech over the next two years by developing software or other technologies to enhance existing offerings.” Could the three-phase approach help your business achieve its aspirations, too?
Renew
When your UI is ageing, internal and external customers fall out of love with it, comparing it - unfavourably - to modern apps in their toolbelt. While the backend of your systems is where the real magic lies (your complex IP), the UI is how you communicate that magic to your users.
UI wrappers can refresh the look and feel of your applications, for a facelift without changing any of the underlying functionality or logic. Renewing your UI in this way can boost user satisfaction and lead to more effective use of the application, improving retention and fortifying social proof. It’s an opportunity to breathe new life into your legacy applications and buy time for backend modernization.
During this phase, UI and UX designers can think critically about user needs as compared to current app use cases and workflows, as well as develop a consistent, reusable visual framework. Then, front-end developers can leverage low-code tools like WaveMaker to develop these web app designs with UI wrappers in combination with HTML and CSS.
Rebuild
With a fresh new look, you have bought more time with users - time to dedicate to a software rebuild.
Extract and consolidate data and logic from existing systems
This process begins by modeling and visualizing the current application architecture, data sources, and interactions, then drilling down into the logic. Various tools like Leanix and Sparx can be leveraged to do the heavy lifting, or you may select a combination of technologies and practices to perform current system modeling. From here, you can identify modern solutions that are a better fit and won’t require significant re-architecture, or where this isn’t possible, modernize by wrapping and exposing services via REST APIs.
Develop a new app strategy
The reason that we suggest composable, cloud-based app architectures, designed for low-code Lego-like software building, is that the composable app strategy is a solid foundation for the future. This relatively new software development paradigm builds on several key software engineering revolutions: microservices architectures, cloud and serverless architectures, and low-code tooling. It’s also a crucial part of the wider trend toward the composable enterprise, where an organization is made from modular interchangeable blocks, able to rearrange and reorient as needed, depending on external (or internal) factors.
Converge on a new tech stack
It makes sense to use a tech stack that combines:
● Popular open standards
● Microservice architectures
● Cloud-first design
A low-code tool that embraces these key tenets will allow a small team of developers to build a new, working software architecture fast, for future compatibility.
“By 2025, 60% of new SaaS designs will support both the UI-first and API-first access, making preparedness for composability a common cloud application trait.” - Gartner
Is it always necessary to migrate to the public cloud? No, but having software that is readily portable, scalable, and distributable across systems secures its future viability in shifting infrastructure demands. There is a reason that Forrester predicted that forty percent of firms would take a cloud-native-first strategy in 2023. Container-based distributed architectures simply make sense, and cloud providers’ management consoles offer greater insight - and oversight - into running applications.
How to migrate to the cloud
Replatforming is strategic and the organization should use a general framework to guide progress. Broadly, the flow starts with requirements assessment, choosing a platform that meets that need, updating your apps and staging them for testing, before moving to production.
But with a microservices approach that low-code platforms take, migrating to the cloud is mainly a matter of packaging the services into containers and identifying the right cloud services for them to run on. For most applications, this will include services like Docker Compose for multi-container apps, databases for persistence when containers stop running, and container hosting cloud services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service for orchestration and AWS Elastic Container Registry. Always test containerized apps locally before beginning migration, to ensure they work as expected. Once the services are identified, migrate existing data to new cloud database services, set up cloud services, configure networking and security, and deploy containers and monitoring.
Choose to shift apps to the cloud where it makes sense for easy maintenance, dynamic scaling, and lower operational costs – all three are the mantras of low-code platforms too.
The bottom line
Before signing on to build out another enterprise software module, or attempting to spin up a whole new product, take a closer look at using low-code as a strategic tool to embrace enterprise modernization. It’s a way to migrate your legacy applications into modern, composable applications, ready for even citizen developers to innovate beyond what was previously possible.
