As we wind our way to the new normal, we find that work routines have changed, as have patterns of supply and demand. Enterprise leaders must not only reevaluate their businesses, but also how they perceive business risks.
In times of crisis, decisions that leadership deemed too risky may now become a top priority. Initiatives that had been bogged down in complexity are now mission critical – including digital transformation.
Such is the case with many enterprise digital transformation initiatives, especially when application modernization challenges were the bottleneck that impeded progress.
Today, business leaders have no such excuse. Digital transformation is not only mission critical; it is urgent. And if legacy applications are the sticking point, then identifying and deploying rapid approaches for addressing their issues may very well become the savior of the enterprise itself.
Rethinking the Risk of Modernization
Let’s say you have a mission-critical, legacy mainframe or client/server application and a three-year modernization plan that transitions it to a modern codebase and architecture over time.
Now, along comes Covid-19, and demand for that application skyrockets. All of a sudden, you have two months instead of three years. What do you do?
First, you reevaluate your three-year plan. Chances are, the reason it was going to take so long is because of various perceived risks – including the fact that nobody wanted to take the risk that the application would go down, especially for an extended period.
Today’s risk calculation is quite different. Perhaps there is sudden demand for the legacy application requiring greater scalability than was previously possible. As a result, moving the functionality to a scalable, cloud-native architecture built on Kubernetes and microservices might be the best approach.
Keep in mind that modernization strategies are a question of priorities. Modernizing certain functionality is always more urgent than the rest. True, it will eventually be important to modernize most or all of the legacy application functionality, but today the focus is on what’s most important.
Taking the Right Approach to Modernization
There are many different technical approaches to application modernization, each with its own pros and cons. Some of these techniques are ‘big bang’ approaches, including replacing the legacy application wholesale. In times of crisis, however, all-or-nothing simply doesn’t make sense, as it takes too long.
Also quite common are the ‘leave-and-layer’ techniques that seek to build APIs or other modern interfaces onto legacy assets. When those assets still meet the business need, reworking their interfaces can be an expedient approach to modernizing them.
In the more general case, however, simply placing a wrapper on a legacy application won’t solve the business problem – perhaps because the legacy hardware is too slow or wearing out, or in other cases, legacy software is no longer supported, among other reasons.
Rewriting or replacing an entire legacy application is far too time-consuming in times of crisis. Line-by-line code translators also fall short, as the resulting code still needs extensive cleanup, and in any case, won’t follow modern architectural patterns.
In such cases, the best course of action may be to transition the most important source code to a modern language and platform. Filling this need: Synchrony Systems, whose technology automates the modernization of legacy code transparently while ensuring functional equivalency between new and old code with no interruption of the working applications.
Furthermore, Synchrony Systems transitions legacy code to modern microservices, properly architected and ready to run in a Kubernetes environment – and keeps the code current over time, a capability that no leave-and-layer approach can match.
Automated code modernization like what Synchrony Systems offers doesn’t solve every modernization problem to be sure – but it can rapidly transition mission-critical applications to modern code in order to meet urgent needs, in time of crisis or any other time.
The Intellyx Take: Digital Transformation in Time of Crisis
Enterprises have been struggling to realign their businesses to better serve customers for several years now. The ones that have not been successful can typically chalk their failure up to the intractability of legacy assets.
Nevertheless, focusing on lines of code in a particular application or another can lead to a forest-for-trees oversight – especially in the context of digital transformation. Such transformation may be customer-driven, but it is software-empowered – and that software must be flexible enough to meet shifting customer demands and priorities.
Today, Covid-19 represents a titanic shift in such demands and priorities – both sudden and unprecedented. This turbulence is thus sorely testing enterprise digital transformation efforts.
Given so many people are now working and shopping from home, any enterprise that is unable to transform itself to meet the needs of today’s customers is not only at a disadvantage but may soon be out of business altogether.
Since legacy applications are often the bottleneck for such transformation, legacy modernization is now more critical than ever – and it’s also important for enterprise leadership to rethink the risks of expedient but targeted modernization vs. the company-killing risks of not modernizing quickly enough.
In order to succeed with such modernization in the time of crisis, be sure to have as many tools in your toolbelt as possible – especially tools like Synchrony Systems that can deliver modernized code on a just-in-time, automated basis.
Please see Synchrony Systems’ announcement about its now microservices extraction capabilities for rapid migration of in-house legacy application functionality.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Synchrony Systems is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. Image credit: Payton Chung.
