What is Application Modernization
What is application modernization? App modernization refers to improving existing applications to align with up-to-date business goals, user expectations, and technological progress. In contrast to legacy modernization, the strategy does not dwell on inactive applications and those that need complete restructuring, but, on the other hand, it emphasizes the need to have properly and actively maintained and functional applications for the ongoing business requirements
Modernization may include altering the whole infrastructure (for example, turning to microservices), integrating with cloud platforms, boosting performance, security, or maintainability, and employing modern development practices such as CI/CD or containerization.
Modern software needs to evolve continuously to stay efficient, scalable, and competitive. Even actively developed applications can become outdated in architecture, performance, or technology choices. This article will help you understand:
Why modernizing an app is essential for long-term growth and adaptability
What signals indicate that an application or product needs modernization
How modernization improves user experience, developer productivity, and business agility
What technologies and patterns are shaping modern app architecture
Proven strategies and approaches to modernize without disrupting your business
How Evinent supports companies through the modernization journey
What common challenges to expect — and how to overcome them
The Benefits of App Modernization for Your Business
According to a 2023 Gartner report, 90% of organizations running legacy applications are expected to face increased operational costs without modernization. Application modernization software for your product is not only a technological update, but it also enhances the company's business. Businesses that put resources into modernization are the ones that can reflect better agility, lower costs, and improved customer satisfaction. Here’s how different parts of the business benefit from app modernization:
Accelerated Feature Delivery for Development Teams
Modern architectures like microservices and containerization make development quicker, which thus allows development teams to put continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices into operation, thereby shortening the time-to-market for new features and updates.
Enhanced Scalability and Reliability for IT Operations
Companies can migrate to cloud-native platforms and containerized environments to achieve higher system uptime and scalability. This course of action makes infrastructure management easier and enables IT operations to keep pace with the newest demands.
Improved Business Responsiveness and Market Adaptation for Leadership
Updated apps provide immediate information access and can be easily combined with analytic services. This enables top managers to react swiftly to the data that the market shows, foresee changes in demand, and satisfy changing customer needs.
Reduced Technical Debt and Maintenance Costs
Revamping or remaking outdated elements will remove old connections and make it easier for the system to upgrade in the future. This way, lesser technical debt leads to lower costs of regular maintenance and also a lower chance of the system going down.
Strengthened Security and Compliance
Security practices operating in the most updated mode, like data encryption and identity management, are used in the modernization efforts. This compliance with modern times' norms makes it easier to follow the rules and improve the data protection of a company through GDPR and HIPAA.
Increased Organizational Agility and Innovation
A modular, flexible system architecture empowers teams to segregate work and make the necessary changes without affecting the whole system. Such agility supports innovation and enables one to experiment and adapt to new business opportunities quickly.
How to Determine if an App or a Product Needs Modernization
Updating software is a very strategic decision, and the most important part is to understand the right point in time to do it. It is not always about the full replacement of the system, but there are obvious signs that may appear to inform you that your application is a barrier to your business development, creativity, or efficiency. Check the main signs of the software in the list that prove your product or application is outdated and ought to be rejuvenated.
Frequent Performance Bottlenecks
If your application always faces a difficult time coping with a high number of users, goes down during peak hours, or needs scaling through manual intervention to keep up with the load, these are signs that the infrastructure software is old-fashioned. The latest types of platforms cater to automatic scaling, more efficient resource distribution, and better user experience.
Rising Maintenance Costs and Technical Debt
When developers spend more time fixing bugs and patching fragile components than building new features, your system is likely suffering from accumulated technical debt. This increases the total cost of ownership and slows down innovation. Modernization helps reduce complexity and long-term maintenance costs.
Difficulty Integrating with Modern Services or APIs
If adding integrations, such as payment gateways, analytics platforms, or third-party APIs, has to happen with custom workarounds or waiting for the people to build up, your system might very well not be designed for interoperability. The modern-day API-based and integration-friendly architectures make it simple to follow changing market demand.
Inability to Scale with User or Business Growth
By refusing, growth by the aspect of more users, features, or data could not be served by an application that is not scaling efficiently. It’s already clear that when the upgrade of your infrastructure is on a more frequent basis or when there are lots of manual changes that need to be done, then the time for you to start being well-prepared for the elasticity and sturdiness of your system has already come.
Poor Developer Experience and Long Release Cycles
If engineering teams face legacy systems without CI/CD pipelines, with deployments done very slowly, and test environments that don't support them, it can displease them greatly. If updating will either take too long or will introduce errors more frequently, this makes it essential to innovate and support quicker and more secure deployments.
Outdated User Interface and Declining User Engagement
When the user interface (UI) is out of fashion, performs badly on mobile, or does not match any of the current UX expectations, users are likely to switch to more stylish alternatives. Upgrading the front end, which is usually accompanied by backend refactoring, is the key to not only customer loyalty but also customer satisfaction.
Why Modernize Legacy Applications?
Legacy applications are often mission-critical, but the problem is that they get too pricey to maintain, hard to scale, and dangerous from the business and security perspectives. Modernization is not just replacing with new application modernization technology rather it is a cost reduction, agility improvement, and maintaining competitiveness.
If the legacy applications are so full of opportunities, how are they typically achieved the organizations, and what are the urgent problems that require modernization to be done quickly by the organizations?
Reason №1: Rising Maintenance and Support Costs
Legacy systems often rely on outdated technologies, unsupported frameworks, or even discontinued vendor platforms. Maintaining them consumes a disproportionate amount of IT budget and engineering resources — money that could be spent on innovation instead of patching.
Reason №2: Limited Scalability and Poor Performance
Back then, applications were not designed with today's load expectations or cloud-native architectures in mind, which resulted in a lack of scalability as user demand grows, causing slow response time, down systems, and very expensive workarounds.
Reason №3: Security Risks and Compliance Challenges
Legacy applications typically lack modern security protocols (like OAuth2, TLS 1.3, zero-trust architecture), putting sensitive data at risk. They’re also harder to audit and update, making compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific standards more difficult and costly.
Reason №4: Incompatibility with Modern Tools and Platforms
In many cases, traditional apps' connections with more recent products, interfaces, cloud services, or DevOps pipelines are hard or impossible. This not only stops innovation but also pushes teams to come up with their solutions, which involves technical debt and inefficient operation.
Reason №5: Declining User Satisfaction and Competitive Risk
From unwieldy UIs to mobile unfriendliness, old applications frequently do not correspond to the requirements of the present-day user. This can not just damage the way we see your brand and dampen interaction, but also pave the way for your more agile rivals.
Reason №6: Data Silos and Lack of Real-Time Insights
Legacy apps are something that can trap the data in inaccessible formats or closed systems. However, once modernized, a set of benefits becomes available, such as access to real-time data, one central place to see the data, and decision-making aided by cloud-native data services.
At Evinent, we specialize in application modernization — from evaluating legacy systems to designing scalable, secure, cloud-ready architectures. Whether you need to refactor, replatform, or rebuild, we’ll help you reduce costs, minimize risks, and unlock the full value of your technology investments.
Key Technologies for App Modernization
Modernizing applications is not merely another task of rewriting code, but it is also a step of respecting the best technologies that give opportunity for both scaling, agility, automation, and security. Here are the leading technologies that are behind the prosperous modernization efforts:
Cloud-Native Infrastructure
The cloud service systems, for instance, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, deliver the capability of quickly changing, on-demand infrastructure, which is far better than the inflexible, on-site servers. They allow for swifter deployment, worldwide presence, and the use of managed services that bring down the operational costs.
Containerization (Docker, Podman)
Containers package software and dependencies, so they operate the same way on different infrastructures. As a result, the systems are more portable, deployment is easier, and it's easier to fix broken parts.
Microservices Architecture
Microservices bring much more flexibility, as a result of breaking large systems into smaller, autonomous, and independent services, which is one thing that traditional monoliths lacked. Moreover, the adoption of microservices enables software applications to scale and new features to be released without disrupting the entire system.
Kubernetes and Orchestration Platforms
Kubernetes facilitates the distribution, modification, and handling of applications implemented in containers. HA (Automatic High Availability), Rolling updates, and infrastructure Self-Healing — these are the main components of modern systems that Kubernetes addresses.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Technologies such as Terraform and Pulumi offer you a chance to create your infrastructure very easily and manage it by using code, which means it is version-controlled, repeatable, and can be easily inspected or duplicated in other platforms.
Observability and Monitoring Tools
Tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry offer system performance, ing, and distributed tracing knowledge, which in turn helps teams to rapidly locate and recover from errors.
Application Modernization Patterns
Modernization is not one-size-fits-all. Strategic decisions regarding the path of your application, including platform, architecture, and interfaces, are also part of the application modernization process. Next are the main models that bring the desired effect of being up to date with the minimum effort and out of time by the teams, without any hiccup, and that had an impact on the final result.
From Monolith to Microservices
This pattern involves breaking down a large, tightly coupled monolithic application into a set of smaller, independently deployable services. It improves scalability, makes deployments safer, and enables teams to work in parallel.
Cloud Migration
Moving applications from on-premises infrastructure to cloud platforms (like AWS, Azure, or GCP) enables elasticity, high availability, and access to modern services. Migration strategies include "lift and shift," replatforming, or full refactoring for cloud-native use.
Expose Functionality via APIs
Modern APIs can be used to wrap legacy or core systems, and the whole world of business is at the disposal of organizations. At the same time, it is possible to integrate with other platforms and do a step-by-step upgrade of the backend without disrupting the current functionality that the system provides.
Replatforming
Replatforming involves moving an application to a new runtime environment (such as container platforms or managed services) with minimal code changes. It enables better scalability and operational efficiency while preserving business logic.
Strangler Pattern
This application modernization approach replaces legacy components gradually by building new services around the edges of the existing system. Over time, the old system is “strangled” and phased out, reducing modernization risks.
Containerization of Legacy Apps
Converting the current applications into containers (such as Docker) enables routine effecting, facilitates the process of verification, and takes up fewer resources, is very important to underline the importance of moving to the new cloud or Kubernetes environments.
Event-Driven Architecture
Moving to event-based communication, for example, using Kafka and RabbitMQ, separates components, increases the speed of response, and makes unification between the systems in real-time easier.
Challenges on the Path to App Modernization
Business application modernization has long-term benefits. Nevertheless, reaching the intended destination is usually intricate. Apart from technology debts, the teams have to keep operating the business, deal with complexity in the integration, and struggle with a culture that resists change, to name the most critical. The question is how they can do this all together and still keep the lights on. Here are some of the difficulties most companies encounter while modernizing.
Legacy Code and Outdated Technologies
Most applications are written in old languages, frameworks, or platforms that are outdated nowadays, and at the same time are not known to the most recent generation of developers. Changing such systems through refactoring or rewriting might pose certain threats and max out the time it also needs.
Hidden Dependencies and Poor Documentation
Previous models were typically based on unpredictable actions or tools provided by third parties that no longer exist today. The situation becomes even more complex when one wants to evaluate the real consequences of those actions, thus, the probability of bugs appearing or of breaking some functions is even more likely.
Integration Complexity
Even modernized apps are very much in need of interaction with old systems or other services. The point of the architecture is that the compatibility between the old and new components is difficult to ensure, especially when the data models or protocols differ.
Skills Gap in the Engineering Team
Many teams are not equipped with the necessary knowledge and expertise to implement containerization, microservices, cloud-native development, and DevOps pipelines in the organization. Such tasks, if not performed correctly or with external help, may lead to the halting or failure of the modernization attempts.
Cost and Resource Constraints
It is difficult for modernization projects to survive because of other business priorities that are competing for budget and staffing. It is not easy at all to balance long-term gains against short-term costs, especially when lacking benefits.
At Evinent, we are aware of the fact that the modernization process is not always an easy one. It begins with the legacy code, goes on to the integration problems, and the readiness of the team.
We work with organizations to diminish dangers and provide a clear picture by providing them a customized and easy-to-follow method. If you need to relocate to the cloud, restructure the architecture, or enhance deployment processes, we have professionals who can guide you in every step.
Application Modernization Strategies
Choosing the right application modernization framework is a critical step in ensuring the success of a modernization initiative. A skilled IT provider helps businesses select and implement the most effective path based on the current system’s condition, business goals, and technical constraints. Below are the most common strategies used in modern application transformation.
1. Rehosting
Also known as “lift and shift,” this strategy involves moving an application to a new infrastructure (usually cloud-based) without changing its core architecture. It’s a quick, low-risk approach ideal for reducing infrastructure costs or retiring on-prem servers, but with limited long-term benefits.
2. Replatforming
This involves migrating the application to a new runtime platform (e.g., from bare metal to containers or VMs in the cloud) with minimal code changes. It allows organizations to leverage cloud-native benefits, like scalability and managed services, while keeping core functionality intact.
3. Re-architecting
This is not just limited to refactoring, but it entails rearranging the architecture of the whole presently running system. Refactoring is implemented when the initial solution becomes inappropriate for the needs of businesses or stops being in line with the changes in the technology market. The whole process aims to form a solution that can be easily maintained, expanded, and developed with the cloud in mind.
4. Replacing
The method in question is to replace the outdated application with an off-the-shelf product of a commercial or SaaS nature. It is considered the most appropriate course of action when the current system has become unprofitable or outdated and needs to be made more sustainable to operate. The COTS and SaaS products are some of these replacements.
Every one of these tactics aims at a different objective - the trick is to pick the one that is in line with both your system's current state and your far-reaching objectives. In the following parts, we will be with you through the stages in the real modernization procedure, like what happens at each stage, from evaluation to deployment, so you can be certain of the things that follow along.
A Guide to Modernizing Applications
Step №1: Assessment and Discovery
A modernization partner commences their service by doing an extensive investigation of the current application landscape. This comprises the examination of the present architecture, infrastructure, dependencies, hurdles, and the most important business functionality. The objective is to reveal problems that are not visible at first sight, obsolete parts, and at the same time, create possibilities for better functionality.
Step №2: Defining Objectives and Success Metrics
The provider and the customer together set the overall business and technical goals. With their help, they can establish the ways to measure the achievements of their modernization plan, including improved performance, cost of maintenance cut down, user experience take-up, or quicker deployment cycles. These objectives are the basis of the entire modernization program.
Step №3: Selecting the Right Modernization Strategy
Based on the initial findings, the provider recommends the most appropriate strategy — whether it's replatforming, refactoring, partial rewriting, or a combination of approaches. The choice is driven by the client's goals, technical constraints, timeline, and budget. A reliable partner will always balance ambition with practicality.
Step №4: Designing the Future Architecture
The modifier draws a plan for the up-to-date app that involves the changes in the structure, the new cloud infrastructure, the data flow, and the ways of integration. The most important things are security, scalability, and maintainability. The first phase of the project makes a basis for the system, which will be stable and easy to maintain in the future.
Step №5: Execution in Controlled Phases
The implementation process is completed in small distributions to decrease the level of risk. The supplier initiates the procedure with solitary parts or unimportant modules to ascertain the methodology is working. Every single modification is tested extensively and carried out with the least disturbance to the target audience. In general, this period is dedicated to applying the CI/CD system, converting the program into a set of containers, and creating APIs.
Step №6: Monitoring, Optimization, and Ongoing Support
Once the core modernization is complete, the provider continues to monitor application performance, resolve emerging issues, and suggest optimizations. Long-term support ensures the system stays secure, efficient, and adaptable to future business needs.
Using such a methodical (OMT) approach makes it easier for organizations to decrease the chance of failure, fosters coexistence between technology and business success, and the latter is more enduring. We will now move to the following part where we will delve deep into the action of updating applications with Evinent, starting directly from the initial phase of the process until the final step.
Application Modernization with Evinent
Certainly, outdated software seems to be really inefficient, but quite actively hurting your business performance. In the world of a rapidly changing digital economic environment, businesses are no longer able to be stuck with old systems that do nothing but hamper their growth. Evinent assists companies that have progressive thinking in moving their applications to a new level of technology, not only to match others, but to go beyond.
We are not just doing an upgrade, we are also restructuring, optimizing, and future-proofing. If you are in the fields of healthcare, e-commerce, manufacturing, HR tech, and retail, our way prepares your systems for not only further expansion but also security and scalability, also, being the key.
Why Companies Trust Evinent
20+ legacy modernization projects successfully delivered
99% client satisfaction rate
Up to 35% reduction in infrastructure costs
11+ years of deep expertise in complex modernization efforts
Our Core Modernization Services
Legacy Application Modernization
We revamp outdated systems — CRM, ERP, or industry-specific software — with modern frameworks, scalable architecture, and an improved user experience.
Infrastructure & Cloud Migration
Regardless of the source, or the cloud provider being used partly, or the change of cloud provider from a costly one, we are ready to offer smooth and reasonably priced migration to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Database Optimization
Our work involves not only cleaning but also restructuring and migrating databases to enhance their performance, reliability, and horizontal scalability.
Code Modernization
From deep audits to full refactoring, we transform legacy codebases into secure, maintainable, and modern software solutions.
Development Process Optimization
We streamline your workflows, eliminate bottlenecks, and implement tools to increase productivity and lower delivery costs.
Digital Transformation Strategy
We align up Information Technology infrastructure with the business strategy to drive automation, data intelligence, and the importance of being API-first, thus leading strategic activities over a long time.
Industry Expertise
Healthcare: Secure, compliant modernization of EHR/EMR platforms, patient portals, and telemedicine tools.
E-commerce & Retail: High-load platforms, seamless UX, and real-time analytics integration.
HR Tech: Smarter LMS, onboarding systems, and performance tracking tools.
Manufacturing: Process automation, supply chain modernization, and predictive analytics.
Your old system is not your burden anymore. Through Evinent, it becomes an effective tool. Reach out to Evinent Today— and let's secure your software for the future.
