Thanks to digital transformation gaining recent popularity, software modernization has become a familiar term amongst enterprises. Enterprises have discovered the value of being digitally more present for their clients.
However, there is a critical barrier impacting an enterprise’s digital transformation journey. And that is its monolithic IT infrastructure.
Large enterprise-grade organizations use several business-critical applications. These applications often run on traditional legacy systems, which strains an organization’s IT budgets and maintenance costs.
Modern software architecture isn’t a question of luxury; it is a necessity. The customer journey continues to shift from in-person to digital transactions. At this time, the inability to deliver a smooth digital experience to customers can negatively impact your business.
Whether it is ensuring data security, business continuity, or smooth day-to-day operations, modernizing your IT infrastructure must offer a seamless and omnichannel customer experience.
Let us take a closer look at why modernizing your legacy software is critical for your business operations.
Why Your Business Needs Software Modernization
As time passes, all systems become outdated. An outdated system fails to function efficiently, is expensive to maintain, and can impact your business operations.
There are multiple reasons why adopting modern software systems is necessary for your business to drive success.
1. To Reduce Costs of Maintenance
Legacy systems were initially built to address business needs and functions that are no longer relevant. Maintaining these systems can result in a financial burden to the company because the technology keeps upgrading constantly.
2. For Much Needed Performance Boost
Business systems need to evolve with changing technology. Doing so, however, is complex with legacy systems. This is because legacy software systems are built using no longer relevant or effective technology.
Through modern software development, organizations don’t need to build new systems from scratch. Instead, they can make enhancements to existing systems that can increase business efficiency and reduce potential bottlenecks.
3. To Enhance Security
As systems age, they stop receiving security patch updates, making them prone to hacking attacks and security breaches.
Modernizing legacy software protects business-critical data from being stolen or compromised.
4. To Provide Scalability
Legacy systems fail to support your business’s growing operations. When a business continues functioning on an outdated software architecture, it fails to adapt to changing needs and the latest technological advancements. This impacts the business’s growth and scalability.
Modern software architecture ensures your business can leverage the advanced IT infrastructure that meets the changing technological needs and demands.
5. For Better Customer Experience Delivery
Good customer experience and satisfaction are critical in separating your business from competitors offering similar services and products. Businesses should be able to adapt and serve changing customer demands.
Customers today want a seamless user experience. Modernizing your software ensures your business can deliver personalized, customer-centric applications that impact retention, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Software Modernization Strategies
Have you decided your business needs to adopt modern software architecture but need help determining where to begin? We help you ease the process with a list of top modern software development strategies you can integrate into your business to drive efficiency and growth.
Strategy #1: Architecture Audit
Poor software architecture is among the main reasons businesses suffer a market disadvantage, lose clients, or limit their potential growth.
A modernized architecture helps your business gain momentum in the market, mitigate development costs, and enhance your competitive edge. This is why, before undertaking any software infrastructure modernization project, it is crucial to audit your existing infrastructure.
A thorough architecture, components, and functionality audit should be conducted to identify system bottlenecks and manage risks. This ensures that you can implement the most appropriate modernization solution.
Strategy #2: Code Audit
When an application is critical to the company’s functioning, the quality of the code plays a significant role. A single error or a bug slipping after the code has been released can significantly impact the company’s productivity and brand image.
You may have invested a lot of resources in quality assurance and testing. But is there something else you can do to offer a faster product release with reduced vulnerabilities? The answer is yes; you can audit your software source code.
A source code audit involves analyzing an application’s source code to detect vulnerabilities in security, design, and areas of potential improvement. It involves a regular code assessment throughout the software development lifecycle to discover glitches or bugs that may have been overlooked during unit and acceptance testing.
These audits can be done parallelly with penetration tests. This can help you better test how vulnerable the code is and the risks it poses. Once the code audit is complete, a report containing measures to fix these bugs generates.
Strategy #3: UX Audit
How your software performs determines user journey, conversion rate, and other business-specific KPIs. The primary objective of a UX audit is to enhance your product’s business value.
It also helps you better understand users’ experience with your product and their expectations. UX audit helps businesses remove bottlenecks in the user journey. It also enables you to identify problem areas and outdated UX elements.
You can begin by determining qualitative or quantitative criteria influencing user experience. This might help you discover data regarding feature usage, average weekly and monthly use, customer challenges, and feedback. You can also add your recommendations about the design.
Another suggested strategy is conducting a UX audit of your competitor’s products.
Strategy #4: Defining Product Architecture
Once you have successfully audited your application’s architecture, code, and UX, the next step is to define and evaluate your product architecture.
Product architecture allows you to organize and review your product’s functional elements. It represents the relationship between the functions and aspects of the product. This is important because they are crucial to product development, and their architecture impacts several components of product design.
A well-defined product architecture is an essential step in the early stage of product development. Your product strategy should be able to answer the following questions:
- What features are likely to create a positive user outcome?
- Which product elements no longer appeal to your target audience?
- Where does your product need to improve concerning user outcome and customer appeal?
- What core differentiators can your product have that will separate it from competitors?
Strategy #5: Defining UX Design
User experience must be among the top priorities when undertaking a software modernization project. Users expect an application to be simple and easy to use. Before you go ahead with modernizing your software infrastructure, you need to plan your UX design.
Defining your UX design involves re-designing the user-facing elements of your legacy system. This means developing a system that offers better information access and enables improved user performance.
You can begin by creating a highly accurate prototype of your product. Ensure that it matches user expectations and connects with them. The next step is to get feedback from stakeholders and users to determine if the product can achieve the desired outcome.
Strategy #6: Refactoring Software Code
The next step in modernizing your legacy software is refactoring your software code. It is a systematic process through which a code is edited and improved by cleaning up previously written code.
Refactoring also involves writing new code for features that are being added to the product. It is, however, advisable to wait for the original software to be modernized before adding a new code.
Punit 
Krishan Jangir