Tips for Application Modernisation

In this 10 minute read, Gary Greenall, industry lead for ISVs at ANS, gives some valuable tips on modernising applications. 

With more demand being placed on software engineers to get new applications to market or to get legacy applications up to scratch as quickly as possible, the push to migrate and modernise applications has never been greater.  

In fact, in conversations with many ISVs, I have heard more and more comments on how software engineers are being urged to get as many apps and workloads to the cloud as possible.  A recent report from Gartner sums up the reasons well: “Application portfolios deteriorate over time and gradually lose business fitness, innovation support and agility while becoming increasingly expensive, complex and risky.” 1     

 Whether your app modernisation approach is to re-host, re-platform, rebuild or retire the applications, there are a number of things for an ISV think about: 

   1. Data Security 

When you, an ISV, deploys your software onto a client’s infrastructure, you are just responsible for the software. When you migrate to the cloud and offer SaaS you are also responsible for the security of the data being hosted.  You need to think about the security measures you have in place, are the up to the job? Have you changed your T&Cs to reflect this increased responsibility? Will your service require accreditation or compliance with industry regulations?  There are questions you need to think about and work with your tech partners to establish your costing and operating model.  

   2. Scalability 

Your service cannot be limited by the requirements of today, its needs to be easily scalable to deliver future demand. Ideally, isolate each of your development teams using RESTful services to give total client-server separation and so enable rapid prototyping and development.  Having this separation also means you can offer different tiers of service to suit the requirements of different customer segments. Also, consider an API-driven approach as it makes it much simpler to give access to third parties to extend your application, provide reporting or import/export data.  

    3. Infrastructure as Code [IAC] 

IAC provides standardisation, deployment automation [CI/CD] and increased productivity in software development. Most ISVs I talk to now consider IAC as best practice to deploy infrastructure. 

   4. Use modern alternatives 

The leading public cloud providers offer many services to help modernise legacy processes. For example, you can use queues and streams to decouple services and offer real time alternatives to traditional batch processing. Your cloud partner should be advising you on which services can best help you modernise quickly and effectively.  

   5. Understand multi-tenanted  

Traditionally, legacy software is delivered on a per customer basis i.e a single install of software for a single customer.  To get the most out of cloud you need to offer a multi-tenanted or 1 to many solutions whilst still ensuring security of customer data. You need to use a serverless model to offer isolation to customers in a multi-tenanted environment and have strict Identity Access Management [IAM]. Using serverless technology means you don’t need scaling policies and allows you to place most of the operational burden on the provider.  

   6. Co managed, not dependencies 

You need to be able to react to market changes quickly, scale rapidly as your customer demand changes. You can’t do this is if you are wholly dependent on a third party and their resource availability.  We always advocate a co-managed model, so our engineers are working with your people on the project, getting the job done while up skilling your team at the same time. In this way, you get guidance, support and engineers to work through your backlog, but we don’t leave you unable to make changes and develop your service.  In all situations, we ensure your environment is built correctly to well-architectured principles so you SaaS model can grow seamlessly. 

 

Our ISV team at ANS has worked with thousands of companies over the years and has the know-how and experience to help ISVs modernise apps rapidly and to best practice. We run free workshops that help ISVs plan out their migration journey, cost out projects and even produce business cases for the board. Please get in touch to find out more. 

 

References 

1 Gartner. How to Choose the Right Approach for Application Modernisation and Cloud Migration