Why Software Modernization May be Worth It

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One of the best ways to get the most out of your legacy systems without disruptions or significant changes is with software modernization consistent within your legacy ecosystem. It may be a challenging proposition at first. Still, the modernization of legacy systems is one of the most effective ways to redevelop a much more effective business strategy resulting in a more effective engagement with customers while cutting running costs down significantly.

Technology has come a long way in the past year, let alone from 5 years ago, constantly bringing more features, capabilities, and lower running costs than ever before. Keeping up with these trend changes is crucial to stay ahead of the competition and provide constant improvement. These changes ought to pay off in the long run of any business strategy.

It’s proven that technologies that were the best and top of their class, say 3 to 5 years ago, are now outdated and irrelevant in the same setting. Business strategies, logic, and architecture are changing with the emerging trend of modernized software technologies; This is one reason why software modernization may be worthwhile for legacy systems in some companies today.

In this article today, we will outline all the reasons behind updating legacy systems with modernized software solutions. We will point out each benefit which all businesses will want to achieve with their projects and daily processes.

Table of Contents

What is Software Modernization?

Well, first, we must identify what a legacy software system is. Legacy systems are explained as outdated technologies and applications in the business setting. What software modernization in a legacy system means is to replace these old and outdated systems with a more up-to-date and modern system that fulfills the business’s goals.

Reasons for Software Modernization

Maintenance

One reason for businesses adopting to modernize their software is for easier and better maintenance overall. With legacy systems, maintenance takes too much time, energy, and budget, which progressively increases over time due to its outdated methodologies. The cost can rapidly increase as time progresses because legacy systems used to be built with a monolithic architecture, meaning you can’t modify one section of the software only, the entire system must be modified as an update. Thus, this maintenance structure uses more human resources, time, and budget as time progresses. With software modernization and newer technologies, this is not the case as each software process can be modified without the need to change the entire system. This is due to the new systems’ microservices, making it much easier to update, requiring less energy, less budget, time, and personnel.

Simpler Code

Old legacy systems often use outdated languages, complex and bulkier coding methods, which can be a developer’s nightmare when adding new features to the old system.

With newer modernized software, code is written with updated languages featuring a much less and much cleaner code. 

On top of this, newer languages can feature comments, which can really help developers identify which each line or segment of code does.

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Better Collaboration

It can be quite hard to collaborate with another entity working on the same project as you with older software. It often requires third party systems to be used, which increases the workload dramatically and causes a lot of stress between parties collaborating.

With newer modernized software, a higher level of collaboration can be achieved with minimal stress or interruptions. Modernized software provides a high speed, bugless, secure option of collaboration on projects or tasks.

Modernized software also provides an easier to use and appealing user interface, which makes things a lot better. This is one of the main reasons why companies adopt a modernized software system compared to their outdated legacy systems.

Better Collaboration

Old legacy systems that businesses and companies had implemented five years ago barely had the capabilities to document projects like they are needed today (2021).  It’s said that the clearer the documentation of a project is, the better and easier it is for a newly introduced team to develop, maintain, or service the project. This is where newer modernized software comes into play.

Modernized software helps create an option for ongoing documentation and logging to commence, sometimes being automatically done. Another advantage is that because development in projects takes main priority and documentation can often be left out, using a modernized software system can help with its automation.

It may be a little daunting to change from legacy to modernized because legacy documentation must be updated to modernized documentation; otherwise, it may not be accessible or lost forever in the transition. Documentation is crucial in any project as it outlines what the project is about, development schedules, processes, and functionality. This is usually put to practice when a former team member leaves and a new developer replaces them; they know where to start from or where to pick up the previous developers’ code from.

Wrap Up

While legacy systems served an efficient and powerful purpose in the past, they are often outdated, irrelevant, and redundant in today’s business settings. Updating to a better, more efficient, and powerful modernized software is worthwhile as it provides so many benefits, which are listed above in this article.

As software changes every year and advances, keeping ahead of the trends and continuously updated will ensure your business processes have the utmost upper hand in the market and run smoothly. With the benefits listed above, these aren’t the only benefits but the mainstream benefits which all businesses will want to achieve in their projects.

Big Kitty Labs is one of the leading software development companies in Columbus Ohio that has been developing applications, websites, and software for over 10 years. Contact us for free discovery and consultation on your next project!