Why Application Modernization is Vital for Business Growth

In an era of rapid technological change, the future belongs to organizations that evolve. Legacy applications, while foundational, can hinder progress. Modernizing these systems is more than a tech upgrade; it's a strategic move toward growth, efficiency, and enhanced competitiveness.

Discover how modernized applications can keep you ahead of the curve and accelerate your cloud adoption, with expert insights and solutions from MongoDB. Whether you're beginning your modernization journey or seeking to optimize your approach, this article offers valuable insights and practical steps to guide you through the process.

Table of contents

• What is application modernization?
• Why is app modernization necessary?
• Top challenges of maintaining legacy applications
• Common modernization strategies
• What are the key technologies for application modernization?
• How to get started with legacy app modernization
• How does application modernization work with MongoDB Atlas?
• What does a MongoDB developer data platform do?
• Should you modernize your database to MongoDB?
• Summary
• FAQs

What is application modernization?

A successful app modernization strategy, also known as legacy modernization, software modernization, digital transformation, or cloud transformation, involves giving existing applications a new lease on life.

App modernization entails upgrading current systems with modern programming languages, frameworks, infrastructure, services, automation, and cloud technology. These modifications help organizations bring their existing applications up to current standards, making them more efficient, scalable, and easier to maintain.

Why is app modernization necessary?

Legacy applications are increasingly unable to meet modern business needs. By modernizing existing apps, organizations can improve efficiency, accelerate time to market, and take advantage of the latest technological advancements. Companies of all sizes can experience numerous benefits when legacy applications modernize.

Application modernization benefits include:

• Increased developer productivity.
• Reduced infrastructure costs.
• Better application performance.
• Faster time to market.
• More frequent releases.
• Increased customer satisfaction and retention.
• Greater business agility.

Top challenges of maintaining legacy applications

Managing legacy applications comes with a myriad of challenges that can stifle innovation and operational efficiency. Below are some of the main challenges associated with using and maintaining legacy applications.

Complexity

Legacy systems often consist of large applications with intricate and intertwined components, making updates and maintenance daunting. Their complexity can lead to longer development cycles and higher chances of introducing errors during updates.

Scalability issues

Legacy applications are usually not designed with modern scalability in mind. This oversight means that scaling specific parts of the application, rather than the entire system, can be problematic or even impossible. This issue hinders its ability to handle increased workloads or growing user demands.

High costs and time consumption

Managing legacy applications on-premise is often expensive and time-consuming. These systems typically require significant resources for maintenance, hardware upgrades, and operational support. Maintaining outdated technology can quickly become costly, redirecting funds away from innovation and development.

Risky deployments

Infrequent, manual deployments are common with legacy application systems. These large and risky deployments increase the likelihood of errors, downtime, and rollback scenarios. The lack of automated deployment pipelines means longer release cycles and slower time to market for new features.

Rigid databases

Legacy applications often rely on relational databases with rigid schemas. These inflexible databases slow down development as changes require careful planning and execution. Delays in updating database schemas can reduce operational efficiency, delay the delivery of new features, and necessitate application downtime for updates. Overcoming these challenges by modernizing legacy applications enables businesses to be more agile and responsive to market demands.

Common modernization strategies

According to a Stripe and Harris Poll survey, the biggest hurdle for developers in maintaining legacy systems is facing technical debt. This debt accumulates from quick fixes that lead to more extensive rework in the future instead of implementing sustainable solutions from the outset.

Developers have various choices regarding modernizing applications to better handle today's business needs, including the below options.

Refactoring

When a company refactors, developers update the code base, improving the code without changing the application's functionality. This action allows for independent scaling and easier maintenance.

Replatforming

Replatforming an application involves updating parts of its platform, such as the underlying database, and typically necessitates some codebase modifications as well.

Rehosting or redeploying

Sometimes called “lift and shift,” this method involves moving applications to a public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud environment. It's a straightforward way to gain some of the cloud's benefits without extensive rework.

Rearchitecting

Rearchitecting an application may involve updating the codebase to leverage modern architectures, such as containers or microservices.

Rebuilding

Starting from scratch, while preserving the application's scope and specifications, is also an option and is useful when the existing application is too outdated or inefficient for modernization.

Replacing

Replacing an application involves starting over with a completely new codebase. One approach is to replicate the legacy application feature by feature. Alternatively, you can reimagine the application entirely, determining which features to eliminate and which new ones to introduce.

What are the key technologies for application modernization?

Every app modernization project will be unique. However, a few key technologies frequently appear in the modernization process.

Containers

Companies can containerize their applications, enabling consistent packaging and deployment across various environments—whether locally, on-premises, or in the cloud. This uniformity benefits software development at every stage, from initial development and testing to deployment and support.

Microservices

Organizations may decompose an extensive, monolithic application into several smaller, independent microservices. This architectural strategy provides numerous benefits, such as accelerating time to market, enhancing modularity, increasing flexibility, improving scalability, boosting resilience, aligning better with organizational structures, and reducing costs.

Databases

Technology teams may move from rigid relational databases to more flexible, modern databases, such as the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform. MongoDB databases have flexible schemas that allow for both structured and unstructured data. Through MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB offers self-managed instances or fully managed instances on multiple cloud providers.

CI/CD automation

Organizations may shift from infrequent, manual deployments to frequent, automated deployments by implementing CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery or continuous deployment) pipeline automation. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools can be used to automate and manage the deployment of cloud resources. Atlas has an Admin API that can be used for scripting and resource providers for HashiCorp Terraform and AWS CloudFormation to quickly build, update, and manage MongoDB databases in the cloud.

How to get started with legacy app modernization

After an organization decides to modernize existing apps, they undergo a two-phased process: initial assessment and execution.

Initial assessment

In this phase, the team works together to assess the entire application portfolio and understand the details of each application. As part of the assessment, applications receive ratings on technical implementation, interconnectedness with other applications and systems, anticipated return on investment, and drivers for change. If an application gets a high rating, the team performs a deeper evaluation to estimate the application's modernization efforts.

Execution phase

Once the application assessment phase is complete, the team begins the execution phase. This phase uses an application modernization roadmap, typically following this process:

• Design and architect the application modernization.

• Implement the application modernization, which could involve rehosting, redeploying, replatforming, refactoring, rearchitecting, or replacing the application.

• Validate and test the application outputs.

• Deploy the modernized application.

The execution phase can be completed in a waterfall model or iteratively. In the waterfall model, each step is completed for the entire application before proceeding to the next. In the incremental model, each step in the phase is completed for a small piece of the application, and then the steps are repeated for another small piece of the application.

How does application modernization work with MongoDB Atlas?

One way to modernize existing apps with MongoDB is transitioning from a legacy application relational database to MongoDB Atlas. The MongoDB Atlas developer data platform centers around a fully managed MongoDB database, available in over 95 AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure regions.

Atlas is an easy-to-use and cost-effective modern cloud platform with auto-scaling, serverless instances, and multi-cloud data distribution capabilities. These capabilities allow development teams to focus on their applications without the hassle of managing databases themselves.

When you modernize an application from a relational database to the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform, you will want to do more than "lift and shift" your database. Migrating the data from a relational database's table to a MongoDB collection would undoubtedly work, but the application would likely only reap some of the benefits of modernization. Instead, the team should identify how the application accesses data and create a new, transformed data model.

For a detailed comparison of "lift and shift" database migration versus a modernized and transformed database, check out the "Why the MongoDB Intelligent Operational Data Platform?" section of Legacy Modernization.

Development teams and their key stakeholders can use Relational Migrator for moving data from a relational database to MongoDB.

Many development teams complete the migration process on their own. When they desire external expertise, teams can contact MongoDB's professional services team to build an Application Modernization Factory. Throughout the factory's construction, the MongoDB team provides consulting, program governance, and expertise to ensure the migration's success.

What does a MongoDB developer data platform do?

MongoDB Atlas simplifies development for a wide variety of use cases, scales globally and securely, and optimizes cost-for-performance as data needs evolve over time.

It follows the document model, which is flexible and maps how developers think and code. Developers enjoy a unified interface that allows them to work with any data generated by modern applications, with a fully integrated text search, eliminating the need for a separate search engine.

With Atlas, companies can deploy across clouds in 95+ regions and build modern applications faster to accelerate go-to-market timelines and secure a competitive advantage.

MongoDB Atlas also:

• Provides organizations with a flexible local data store with seamless edge-to-cloud sync.

• Offers in-place, real-time analytics with workload isolation and native data visualization.

• Runs federated queries across operational and transactional databases and cloud object storage.

• Offers a resilient, scalable, and secure platform with turnkey global data distribution for data sovereignty and industry-leading data privacy controls.

MongoDB Atlas solves companies' biggest challenges by eliminating the technical debt from legacy systems’ data infrastructure. This helps drive innovation, reduce risk and operational costs, modernize their underlying infrastructure, and achieve true digital transformation.

Should you modernize your database to MongoDB?

Modernizing databases with the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform can help:

• Improve application performance.
• Reduce costs.
• Increase developer productivity.
• Strengthen resilience.
• Increase scalability.
• Enable global data distribution.
• Avoid platform lock-in.
• Accelerate innovation.
• Increase business agility.
• Enhance customer experience.

But how do you know if the effort required to modernize your database is worth it? With the MongoDB Modernization Scorecard. This convenient tool allows you to identify which of your existing systems are good candidates for modernization to MongoDB.

Download the MongoDB Application Modernization Guide today to get a copy of the Application Modernization Scorecard and determine whether a MongoDB modernization effort makes sense for your business needs. It contains an example schema that was migrated from a relational database.

Summary

Application modernization can increase developer productivity, reduce infrastructure costs, allow for more frequent releases, and speed processes. You can use modernization to adapt your current application with rehosting, redeploying, replatforming, refactoring, rearchitecting, or replacing it with a new system.

Your company's competitive advantage lies in its ability to unleash the power of software and data to build richer digital experiences. MongoDB makes it easy to go from an idea to an application serving users all over the world—whether it's building a new application or optimizing an old one. Increase your development team's ability to build the next big thing and get your ideas to market faster by modernizing your database with MongoDB Atlas.

If you'd like professional assistance in modernizing your database, please visit the Application Modernization Factory.