COVID-19 has uncovered many business concerns and major technological hurdles, and it’s clear now more than ever that legacy applications can be a tremendous liability for business continuity.
Businesses need the ability to operate from anywhere right now and doing so takes more than accessing data in the cloud. Mission-critical applications also need to be accessible from anywhere, in real time.
Virtualization options like Windows Virtual Desktop offer a quick way to provide that access in many cases and may be a good solution for your business while you modernize your applications. But virtualizing legacy applications doesn’t change the fact that they still rely on dated technology and an on-premises infrastructure requiring a physical presence to maintain, which is risky as we fight COVID-19 and will remain risky in the future.
Both during and beyond the challenges created by this global health situation, modernized applications allow you to focus on what really matters — providing value to your customers — while reducing the risk of downtime, lowering operational costs, and being able to quickly respond to changing customer, business, and regulatory demands.
There are also significant business risks and productivity losses from relying on applications that are built on technology that is either out-of-support or will be soon. Here’s a deeper dive into why now is the time to modernize your applications and how to get started.
Modern Applications Let You Focus on Serving Customers
The primary goal of most organizations is to serve their customers in the best way possible. While COVID-19 has changed how that looks for many, the goal remains the same. Regardless if your customers are businesses or individuals, or if you’re offering a product or a service, legacy applications have a way of getting in the way and slowing you down.
If your staff is spending too much time navigating and maintaining legacy applications, it’s a costly distraction. Modernized applications allow your staff to shift their focus back to what really matters, which is seamlessly serving your customers.
Modern Applications Reduce the Risk of Downtime
Many legacy systems are built on older technology and often pre-date the individuals tasked with maintaining them. Over the years, a patchwork of updates and customizations have also caused them to grow in complexity, making them inefficient, less secure, and more costly to maintain.
To top it all off, older technologies that are reaching end-of-life status are an ongoing source of concern as internal IT departments or third parties inherit more maintenance responsibility without support from the creators.
Any of these issues alone could increase your risk of downtime — but combined with the challenges of remote operations and off-shore support disruptions in a COVID-19 business environment, it’s a perfect storm.
Modernized, cloud-based applications alleviate these challenges while providing more agility, security and flexibility both now and into the future.
Modern Applications Reduce Operational Costs
Analysts say that 80% or more of annual IT budgets are typically spent on operating, maintaining and managing legacy systems.1,2 Having legacy applications eat up the majority of your IT budget leaves little room for innovation and new technology adoption, which are both necessary to increase customer value, establish your marketplace advantage, and enable you to thrive in a modern business environment.
Instead of dealing with legacy hardware and software that will continue consuming your technology budget for the next two, three, even five years before you’re inevitably forced to modernize — take the opportunity now to turn your applications into agile, flexible, and highly available drivers of growth.
Modern Applications Equip You to Adapt Rapidly
Imagine coming up with a new or better way to serve your customers on Monday and making it a reality merely days or even hours later. Imagine having the ability to scale resources up or down to adjust to capacity needs on the fly or implement security measures to meet new compliance demands — all from any device anywhere in the world, inside or outside of your office.
Modernized applications allow you to do all this and much more, equipping you to adapt rapidly to both planned and unplanned changes. COVID-19 has shown businesses how important it is to have this ability now, but beyond the current situation, modernized applications create new business opportunities and efficiencies, give you the power to adapt to future market demands, and enable you to innovate faster to disrupt your industry.
So, Where Do You Start?
The first steps toward modernizing your applications include assessing your systems to identify the best candidates for modernization, then defining your modernization journey while considering every angle before implementation — from goals and objectives to regulatory requirements, company policies, and the best cloud technologies and architecture to use.
At 10th Magnitude, we holistically approach app modernization through a focus on people, process and technology — all with a singular focus on delivering high-quality customer value at a fast cadence. By aligning these three highly correlated pillars, we can help you decrease time to market, scale on demand, and increase your marketplace advantage.
We’re Microsoft’s 2019 DevOps Partner of the Year and an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider, and we’re here to expertly modernize your applications to take full advantage of the cloud. Get in touch today to get started.
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