Harboring legacy systems decelerate business productivity, compromise data security, and increase financial burden. This incurs high technical debt over time. A report shows that 80% of the IT budget is used for maintaining legacy infrastructure. Another article highlights that 90% of enterprises are still encumbered with legacy systems. This negatively impacts operational efficiencies and hinders profit growth. Working with legacy systems is unsustainable for driving long-term growth.
Despite the factual truth that legacy systems lead to operational downtime, the idea of legacy system modernization in Europe is still debatable due to the exorbitant modernization costs, migration complications, and organizations’ cultural resistance.
However, European enterprises need to modernize their legacy systems. This will augment operational efficiencies, save costs, and establish compliance and security in real time.
Read the blog to learn about the steps to effectively implement legacy system modernization in Europe. It highlights an approach suitable for app modernization, ensuring minimal disruption and maximized productivity.
The Struggles of Legacy System Modernization in Europe and How to Overcome Them
Legacy systems limit the potential of realizing full-scale digital transformation. True. However, the path of modernization also poses certain challenges, such as:
1. High Complications and Costs: High capital expenditure is one of the major business challenges restricting legacy system modernization in Europe. Quality modernization needs expert professionals, an upfront hefty investment, and proper execution planning. For most businesses, the expense of replacing a fully operational existing system can be overwhelming. Moreover, businesses also need to address the additional technological complexities of legacy system modernization in Europe due to the absence of accurate documentation and proper IT developer support.
Solution to Overcome: Instead of going all out, businesses can consider a multi-phased approach to spread costs and limit business downtime during the legacy system modernization. Prioritize modernization areas based on urgency, value, and impact. Moreover, businesses can utilize pay-as-you-go cloud services to effectively reduce the initial capital costs.
2. Operational Disruption and Production Halt
The process of legacy system modernization automatically raises the problem of operational disruption. It affects business flow and frustrates customer experience. The resultant downtime can lead to economic loss as well as tarnishing the reputation of the business.
Solution to Overcome: An incremental modernization approach, merged with a hybrid strategy, can be useful for businesses in executing legacy system modernization. The Strangler Fig Pattern (SFP) tool is beneficial for the purpose.
The SFP tool provides a proxy layer that helps in the gradual introduction of new system components while ensuring the active operation of legacy systems. This intermediary layer slowly transports requests from the legacy to the new systems. Pilot testing, deployment testing, and possessing durable rollback plans minimize downtime issues, averting unwanted production halts.
3. The struggle of data migration: Achieving data migration and its seamless integration is a Herculean feat. It is a common ordeal in legacy system modernization across European enterprises. Data migration in large volumes comes with risks such as data corruption, inefficiencies, and data loss.
Solution to overcome: To streamline data migration and avoid potential data loss, European enterprises leverage migration automation tools to incorporate backup strategies and data validation. Data standardization and data cleansing prior to further assuring safe data transference during migration.
4. Integration inefficiencies: A study demonstrates that 59% of organizational leaders in Europe still rely on Google or Excel spreadsheets, and 49% of businesses still use paper checklists to compensate for the absence of system interoperability between monolithic systems. This complicates integration with the cloud, as well as other advanced technologies.
Solution to overcome: Using middleware solutions, secure APIs, and integration platforms such as MuleSoft and SnapLogic can connect to the legacy and modern systems, streamlining data interoperability and seamless integration.
5. Compliance and regulation issues: The government has imposed stringent regulations on businesses addressing data security and compliance. This means European businesses need to have a robust and responsive modernized system architecture. Along with the GDPR mandate, regulations like the NIS2 Directive (Network and Information Systems) and Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) demand robust data protection and guardrails.
Solution to overcome: An effective solution is to incorporate security measures in every step of the legacy system modernization. This approach guarantees the integration of security into the initial process, rather than implementing it post-deployment. Integrating security protocols and measures can be challenging. Partnering with a professional service provider, such as Evoke Technologies, can significantly streamline this transition.
6. Resistance against change: Machine learning readiness in European businesses is limited when compared to other countries such as the U.S. Businesses are skeptical of legacy system modernization across Europe. This is because they have limited understanding of the potential of modernization and its benefits.
Solution to overcome: Businesses need to conduct training sessions, encourage clear communication, and encourage employee involvement. The team of app modernization experts at Evoke, for instance, can help businesses with necessary training, expert guidelines, and insights to better understand and embrace migration.
Practical Methods to Implement Seamless App Modernization
Here is a list of steps to establish seamless modernization in your company.
1. A well-defined roadmap: The first step is to develop a well-laid-out strategic plan aligned with business goals and intent. For example, identify the integration issues, technical debt, and compatibility limitations of front-facing systems, among others.
Use the framework of the ‘7 Rs of Modernization’—Retire, Retain, Rehost, Relocate, Repurchase, Replatform, and Refactor. Identify which apps are critical and which to exclude to cut costs and simplify migration. Assess the migration compatibility of the existing apps. Use lift and shift with minimal code changes to enable cloud migration. Slowly shift the entire working ecosystem to the cloud. Change the legacy systems with SaaS apps for enhanced functionality. Perform modifications as needed, followed by a complete revamp of the applications to make them cloud-native and scalable.
A European financial provider, for instance, can determine how many apps it wishes to retain out of 170 legacy apps. Based on the modernization of urgency, the business can apply to rehost its customer-facing apps tasked with providing self-help financial advisers and routine deposits and withdrawals.
A hybrid strategy helps businesses in prioritizing high-stake areas and complexity. This can aid in cultivating machine learning readiness in European businesses
2. Embrace microservices-based architecture: Use tools like the Strangler Fig Pattern to establish the microservices architecture. The approach helps in developing apps connected with specific APIs. It supports incremental service introduction and deployment without affecting the other business processes. Use containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), Domain-Driven Design, and workflow automation. A manufacturing company can break its ERP legacy infrastructure into smaller, independent services like inventory management and product scheduling. This reduces the risk of affecting the ERP system.
3. Prioritize compliance and security: Enforcing strong compliance and security measures is non-negotiable to implement legacy system modernization across Europe. Consider the ‘security by design’ approach and integrate compliance and security measures across the modernization process. Use secured APIs and middleware tools such as MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Informatica, and Microsoft Azure Logic Apps.
4. Encourage skill development across teams: Finally, businesses across Europe need to adopt a cultural shift across teams. Company leaders need to provide training and upskilling courses to empower people to actively leverage cloud-based modernized apps, new tools, and other technologies. Provide cloud certificates, motivate teams to engage in collaborative projects, and seek new skills. Utilize feedback loops and embrace an experimentation outlook.
Legacy system modernization in Europe has become critical for complying with EU regulatory requirements. This necessitates immediate app modernization to build a secure digital ecosystem and increase its market responsiveness. However, the pressure from regulations also increases the complexities of app modernization and integration. Achieving robust migration with minimal downtime, disruption, and expense can be challenging. Proper assessment of the existing infrastructure, system compatibility, and data interoperability issues is essential to overcome this ordeal. Evoke Technologies, one of the most reputable service providers in Europe, can help you with this.
Our team of app modernization experts possesses the right set of tools and expertise. We empower your business with a roadmap for modernizing legacy systems that help your business thrive while also maintaining compliance with regulations across Europe.
Connect with us to know more.