What Is a Rewriting Application Modernization Strategy?
In the rewriting process, professional developers manually recreate the existing legacy application within a newer, more optimal environment. It’s a way of keeping alive applications that might otherwise be on their last legs.
“You do this when you’ve gotten to the point where it’s no longer cost-effective, it’s no longer practical to maintain the application. This is somebody biting the bullet and saying, ‘You know what? Let’s just start to rewrite it,’” Schulz says. “You would do this in order to offload technical debt. Rather than holding that existing system together, struggling to maintain it, you just go and rewrite it.”
This approach requires a degree of caution. “The caveat there is that in the course of rewriting it, you are also rearchitecting it, redesigning it. Are you doing that with the same scope, maintaining basic form, functionality, capability?” Schulz says.
It can be worth pursuing this approach if the information in the application is of sufficient organizational value.
“This becomes important when the data contained within that application is something that the organization has spent a lot of time and money creating. Maybe that data is on a mainframe, but you still need to leverage those data systems to help execute your business processes,” Marston says.
In that scenario, “you’ve made tremendous investments into those systems and you want to continue to leverage them. But you also want to take advantage of benefits that a more modern environment may offer from security, performance and resiliency standpoints,” he says.
In order to make this path effective, it makes sense to engage all relevant stakeholders.
“You’re going to need to have a dialogue between the various architects and the various application developers,” Sustar says. “And there’s always going to be some kind of creative tension there because the developers are tasked with getting things out the door very quickly, and the architects are meant to have a more strategic view about what’s going to be supportable and sustainable over time. In rewriting, they need to have that conversation together.”
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What Is a System Replacement Modernization Strategy?
A system replacement strategy is often viewed as an emergency exit. The legacy system and its applications are taken offline and replaced with software solutions from third-party vendors.
“Maybe you just need something better,” Schulz says. “Is there something that you can buy off the shelf — a service, a cloud capability, an Office 365, a Salesforce or other Software as a Service? Maybe there’s an entirely new or existing system that you can leverage.”
This approach may require some thoughtful financial parsing. “With that SaaS offering, maybe even if it’s X percent more expensive over the long run, it still makes sense because of the budgeting, the flexibility, the compliance,” Sustar says. “If it makes the government entity more strategic, it can be worth it.”