Five Reasons to Modernize Your Apps in 2023

As a business leader, asking yourself what our technological plan will be for 2023 is essential, especially in a world as changeable as the current one, marked by digital transformation, vulnerabilities, and changes in the business model, which is day after day more focused on people’s needs.

Regarding digital transformation, companies are globally witnessing this as the best way to face the latest challenges, such as staying competitive, launching products and services, simplifying processes, and providing better user experiences in an increasingly connected world.

According to Statista^[1], in 2023 the number of devices per person will be 3.6 worldwide, with special growth in the United States and Western Europe. In Latin America it’s estimated that the average is 2.

In this scenario, one of the challenges of digitization strategies is to ensure that applications work on all devices, providing an optimal user experience.

For this reason, talking about application modernization makes sense, since it implies a substantial technological advantage that contributes to leverage legacy applications without compromising costs or causing productivity losses. In addition, it helps business objectives by providing value solutions to customers.

In this article, we show you the five reasons to consider modernizing your legacy applications in your short-term technology plan.

1. The Cost of Not Upgrading is Higher Than the Cost of Upgrading

Failing to update your legacy applications is not an option in the face of rapid technological advances, as this could compromise their operation and even affect your business in various ways:

Functionality: New use cases could be introduced that do not support legacy applications. Think of applications that require milliseconds of latency, like AR/VR or real-time business analytics.

Today, the world of software applications is increasingly interconnected. This means that your software will depend on other software (for example, if your website depends on payment processing). If the rest of the world moves to modern technology and you don’t, you will lose out.
Experience: A bad UX means loss of customers, and this implies less usability, security, speed, and scalability. According to HubSpot^[2], 88% of consumers are less likely to return to a website when the user experience is negative.
Agility: Changes and the development of new services are slower, and as a result it slows down time to market/innovation and can cause a lost business to competitors.
Maintenance: Currently, maintenance dominates the IT budget (rather than innovation), so business operations could become too expensive with legacy systems compared to competitors with newer systems.

2. Not Updating Your App Represents Risks

Applications that are not modernized are more vulnerable to attacks. According to Quantum^[3], cyber attacks are becoming more common, sophisticated, and damaging.

A few reasons can explain this change in the cybersecurity landscape:

With digitization, more and more services are offered as software, which increases the attack surface.
The complexity of the attacks are increasing, so not having security updates could become a vulnerability.
The number of attacks is increasing: by 2022, 88% of security leaders said phishing attacks affected their organizations^[4].

3. Improves Developer Experience

Nowadays, finding technical talent isn’t easy and businesses can depend on this. According to McKinsey^[5], 87% of global senior executives said their companies are not ready to address the digital skills gap.

Therefore, when you find talent, you have to retain it. On the issue of modernization, we must consider that the world scenario points towards building better and better software, so the most prepared engineers will not be interested in working with legacy systems where experience is poor.

Why? Because of legacy applications. They:

Don’t allow using modern application architecture.
Don’t allow using microservices.
Aren’t natively built for serverless.
Don’t allow to be used on distributed platforms like the edge

Today, to work properly, an application must meet basic requirements such as scalability and performance, so developers are responsible for managing various tools of modern applications. Between them:

Microservices: In serverless (event-based) computing, developers build microservices instead of monolithic applications, which allows them to obtain benefits such as fault tolerance, ease of implementation, code reuse, efficient work distribution, among others.
Jamstack: This software architecture adheres to components such as Javascript, API, and Markup, which maximize the efficiency, security, scalability, and above all, the speed of applications.
Node js: This framework, based on the React® JavaScript library, offers tools for building and optimizing fast web applications.

So a modern approach will take care of all that so developers can focus solely on writing code and shipping it quickly.

That will keep them happy and improve their productivity, which will help the business succeed.

4. You Will Be Able to Make the Most of Your Technology Stack

We know that an application does not exist in isolation, but that hardware, networks, platforms, systems, tools, libraries, databases, etc., are related, and everything is being modernized. According to Flexera, software products have a life cycle of approximately five years.

So software is constantly being updated, and if an application depends on it and is not updated, it will not be able to take advantage of its new capabilities.

For example, if an application architecture is outdated or uses old programming languages, it will be more challenging to process modern applications, which could lead to extra expenses.

Therefore, if the technology stack is upgraded, it will take full advantage of the technology stack and save the cost of supporting old software, which can range from $7 to $19 million per year^[6].

5. Provides Business Agility

Modernization helps to adapt to changes and take advantage of them to benefit customers.

We know that customer expectations are increasing and the market is constantly changing, so you must ensure that your experiences are positive—and this demands business agility.

When you have business agility, it’s possible to better adapt to technological changes that arise from one moment to the next. This, in turn, allows you to be more competitive, especially in a world that, in recent years, has shown us that it can be very changeable and in which events such as the pandemic or the war in Ukraine require digital responses, with modern approaches, to make business decisions quickly.

So, companies must update their application architecture from the ground up to quickly assemble, disassemble, and reassemble application components so they can adapt their business models, operating structures, and business processes to changing customer demands.

As you can see, modernizing your applications can’t wait. If you want to know more about the benefits of application modernization, talk to one of our experts.