Ways to Address the Significant Challenges of Legacy Application Modernization

It is becoming difficult for companies working on legacy applications like AS400 and adapting new technology solutions in today’s digital world is a little challenging. Today’s business landscape is very different from the one that we were seeing five years ago – and the trend keeps on changing. The advent of the latest technology has prompted companies to upgrade their business models and think seriously about the future.

The enhancement to business models continues to focus more on updating legacy applications. In many cases, outdated IBM AS400 iSeries has become a major stumbling block for businesses. Operational models are being renewed: organizations want their critical business applications to be more flexible, scalable, and free from operational interruptions.

What does Legacy App Modernization Means?

Legacy application modernization means upgrading an existing enterprise framework with more modern, agile, scalable, highly accessible, and secure solutions. Application modernization means redesigning existing business applications to meet growing digital needs. Upgrading your old apps with new architecture and features gives them a new life, prevents them from becoming obsolete, and creates attractive business value.

Challenges of Legacy App Modernization

Lack of Knowledge

This is the main challenge in updating legacy apps for the following reasons:

Developers who developed the application are no longer in the organization or connected to the application.
Functional and technical documentation is missing, irrelevant, or outdated,
The source code is highly corrected
Used third-party application/library resources not available.

One possible way to deal with this is to go to code manually and select a function, which is a tedious task since most codes (usually about 30-40% of the entire code base) are redundant or no longer exist.

Heavy Legacy Ecosystem

Each organization has been running its own IT setup, and even today, there are plenty of applications in legacy technology. In such cases, when management decides to update the old footprint completely, it significantly impacts the business. When we take even a single application to update, the upstream and downstream applications will remain in the old technology, with many old protocols, file formats, etc., and it’s not possible to modernize them in one go.