How Can DhiWise Help You Unite The Power of Legacy App With Advanced Technologies?

Around one-third of the software apps in the world are currently using legacy technologies. That means most of them are nearly outdated and slow to evolve. Though few of them may still be able to cater to users’ and clients' specific needs; in reality, they are like volcanoes that are waiting to explode!🌋😲

Almost 80% of the IT experts believe that not modernizing IT apps may impact business in the terms of security, customer satisfaction, scalability, and service efficiency. It affects the organization’s ability to adapt to the changing business landscape.

Let’s understand in detail why the modernization of legacy apps is critical, how it affects your business, the challenges of modernization, and how DhiWise can help you to free your app from legacy technology issues with modernization.

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What is a legacy application and how it can affect your business?

A legacy application is a software program/s that is outdated. Even though businesses sometimes require legacy apps and websites to keep up with their activities it can create complications for the IT support team as well as developers who maintain the app code. 

The legacy app may have the following issues,

•  Not compatible with the current operating system, technologies, browsers, and IT infrastructure.
• Inefficient and unstable performance.
• Have increased security risk as most of the underlying technologies and tools used in the app are no longer supported by vendors.
• Lacks data processing power as old applications are not built to support data processing and analytics.
• Code maintenance is difficult because the software has multiple dependencies. The cost of maintaining legacy code is higher than maintaining the modern app code. 
• Legacy apps can be too difficult to integrate with the new software and systems.
• The skill needed to support the system is no longer available in the market.

Some examples of legacy app failure in different sectors

Banking

According to the Financial Times report, the shortage of developers experienced in COBOL has eventually forced many banking businesses to switch technology. 

The Royal Bank of Scotland(RBS) banking software system had faced IT issues caused by legacy technology. The outdated IT infrastructure used by  RBS started breaking under the strain of customer demands that were built before the mobile banking age.

Retail businesses

Many retail web applications are using legacy technologies, though the retail businesses are required to be more efficient and up to date. It has been estimated that nearly 58% of the IT budget in retail industries is spent on legacy applications.

During the pandemic, many retail businesses experienced a surge in mobile payment usage, delivery app downloads, and buy-online-pick-up-in-store concept adoption.

Video sharing app

Google has legacy system issues too!

One of the big problems revealed in the Wall Street Journal is how Google struggled to sell ads on YouTube in its initial days. The issues they face were,

• Inefficiencies in selling ads due to manual system, legal hurdles, and temporary workers.
• Bill calculation for ads was manual.

The lesson we can get from Google and other organizations is that you have to stay on top of your apps and systems by regularly upgrading and if necessary migrating them to the new technologies. 

However, it can be challenging to migrate an entire legacy application or a part of it while keeping the legacy app still running.

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Legacy app modernization challenges.

Let’s look into the major challenges of legacy app migration

1.High cost

Typically legacy applications don’t have any scope for improvement they need to be maintained enough to keep them running. If the legacy application is monolithic which is true in 80% of the cases it's difficult to understand and implement the business logic using new technology.

The following parameters add up to the legacy app migration cost. 

• Business user training, monitoring. 
• On-premise to cloud infrastructure migration.
• Training developers and testers.
• App development and IT operation.
• Transition cost to support the business during migration.
• Migration failure cost if the migration fails or stalls.

2.Absence of necessary documentation

Not having the necessary documentation for the software makes it difficult to understand the internal working of the system and software. Migration efforts are generally hampered by the absence of clear documentation and guidelines.

3.Heavy legacy ecosystem

When the IT organization decides to modernize its applications in the entire ecosystem, it impacts business heavily. In such a situation it's risky to take the whole system with all applications to the modern platform in one go. 

To overcome such an issue one needs to follow a chunking approach, where developers modernize the critical functionality first followed by the rest. Once everything is done the support for legacy software can be turned off.

4.Data migration

Legacy applications have lots of data generated from business transactions. All this data is organized across databases in various formats. The legacy system using older encoding can add more complexity to the data migration than the modern system that uses ASCII or ASCII-based encoding.

5.Knowledge deficit

The most common challenge in app modernization is knowledge deficit. Legacy applications are more than 5 to 7 years old, during which most developers who worked for the project no longer exist in the organization or shifted to another project. Also, there are chances of unmanaged code and technical documentation, missing data sources, and no more third-party software support.

6.Quality assurance

Before deploying the modernized applications it's important to assure it is running well by performing sufficient testing with all possible test scenarios and test cases. It is done to check that the modern applications are functionally equivalent to the legacy software. 

Technologies change day by day and it's hard to keep up with the technology updates and upgrades. Despite all these challenges, businesses can’t keep a close eye on the modernization of legacy apps. Finally, we all know it is a continuous process that is inevitable.

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Legacy app modernization approaches

Modernization refers to the updating, rewriting, and migrating part of the entire application system to a modern one using the latest technologies, tools, platforms, libraries, and coding languages that best fit your user and business needs. 

The concept is very broad. Let's look into the different approaches used in the modernization of legacy application systems.

• Application code rewrite: Developers can rewrite/rebuild entire code or specific software system components without changing business logic. 
• Rehosting application: Rehosting app to more advanced infrastructure for scalability and performance.
• Build entire new application software: Consider new user and business requirements and build a new system.
• Adapt new app development architecture: Consider changing architectural requirements and use new technologies, and development environment, to implement the clean, efficient and scalable architecture.

However, organizations need to follow a safer way of new technology adaptation as it can make or break your current business.

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Don’t let the modernization of legacy apps break your business, try DhiWise and accelerate your shift from legacy to modern application software 2x faster.

What if I say, developers can now build an entire full-stack application using a single platform with the tech stack they love and the architecture that best fits their app needs. 

Kinda looks like a wonder!🤩

DhiWise is the world’s first ProCode platform which is designed to empower developers so that they can build, scalable, reliable, maintainable, and testable applications faster. The platform offers everything that speeds up your legacy app migration to modern technology.

Are you planning to rewrite the entire application or part of it with the latest technologies using the same or new business logic? 

Then you should know what DhiWise can offer you.

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Multi-tech support:

DhiWise is a ProCode development platform that supports popular technologies used by the majority of the web and mobile apps,

• Node.js builder with Express.js framework for backend development. 
• React.js- Web App Builder with the Tailwind CSS as a defined framework.
• Flutter Builder to build mobile Android and iOS applications.
• Android Builder (Kotlin) with dual app functionality. 
• Laravel Builder with standard MVC architecture for reliable and secure app backend.

iOS Builder(Swift) for the applications in the Apple ecosystem.

Design to Code in minutes:

Dhiwise provides Design to code functionality that enables developers to convert their Figma design to React.js, Flutter, Android(Kotlin), and iOS(Swift) code.

Firebase and Supabase Integration:

Developers can connect their app to the desired data sources or just upload Postman Collection to configure API requests and Responses.

GitLab and GitHub integration:

Easily share code with the developer team using GitLab and GitHub integrated into the platform.

Logic Builder:

Create app-specific workflows from scratch. Easily work with your app model, set permissions, integrate payment APIs, set up authentication, and more using the drag and drop interface.

Conditional Flow for mobile app builder:

Create conditional flow with your defined condition and platform actions in mobile apps.

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Well, now you know about DhiWise and its major functionalities. So, whether you are starting from scratch or just want to build a specific part of the application system DhiWise makes it super easy and efficient. 

There are more things to know about the platform and its features. But now it's your time to explore it. 

Sign up today and start using DhiWise to speed up your app development.