Legacy Application Modernization with Azure: Paving the Way to a Digital Future

Businesses across the world are looking at increasing operational value and solution scalability by modernizing application, infrastructures, and processes. Microsoft Azure help enterprises move their infrastructure and processes to the cloud, enabling cost savings, creating efficient workflows while enhancing flexibility and security of enterprise data and applications. If your business is still running on premise siloed applications and legacy infrastructure, now is the time to move to the Azure platform and pivot towards enhanced productivity, efficiency, and digital transformation.

Many businesses use legacy applications that are difficult to upgrade, and upscaling them to meet the changing organizational needs would involve significant cost. They are built on technology platforms that are now obsolete, making them difficult to maintain. Also, these legacy applications are built on the traditional business models that might not suit the current and emerging business requirements.

The application modernization market is estimated to grow globally from USD 11.4 Billion in 2020 at a compounded annual growth rate of 16.8% to USD 24.8 Billion in 2025, as per a study from Markets and Markets. This shows how application modernization is fast becoming an imperative for businesses that are looking to stay productive and competitive.

There are inherent benefits to Application modernization on the Azure platform, and these benefits fit in well with all modernization strategies. Though the actual implementation would differ as per the business requirements, the general benefits of App Modernization to Azure are uniform for all cases.

1. The Cost Advantage: The total cost of ownership (TCO) reduces significantly by migrating to the Azure cloud platform. Azure migration helps your business move from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model, thereby giving you benefits in cost savings and improved uptimes.
2. Improved Agility and Performance: Working on a modern cloud-based platform does away with the constraints of legacy code and technology, paving way for faster operational changes and updates, making your processes agile, competitive, and high in performance.
3. Better Application Security: Azure offers enhanced security for applications, with built-in checks for compliance and privacy, along with security recommendations that make your hosted application completely secure.

Native Cloud Applications:
This strategy involves capitalizing on the Platform as a Service (PaaS) feature of the Azure cloud to build cloud native critical applications for modernizing the legacy applications.

Infrastructure based Applications:
This modernization strategy makes use of Azure’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to move on premise applications to the cloud, to effectively leverage scalability, speed, and performance.

Cloud Optimized Application:
This strategy involves using cloud managed services and infrastructure such as containers, for deploying existing legacy applications on the cloud. This uses the IaaS or PaaS models, by making legacy applications suited for cloud deployment.

Microsoft Azure delivers optimal advantage of seamless movement to the cloud, simplified operations, and increased productivity. This results in value driven advantages for business.

Technology options today, empowers customers to switch from legacy applications to adopt modern technologies and transform their business. Leverage those to make the right choice, accomplish business objectives, and unlock full returns on your investments.

The recommended modernization process, derived from Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption framework, has been further refined, improvised and simplified into logical flow to help with your modernization process, governed by four pillars of digital transformation journey: