Revitalise Your Digital Strategy: The Essential Guide to Application Modernisation

To understand the scope of the country’s innovation potential, consider this: only one novelty field, machine learning, is expected to quintuple in size by 2030, according to Statista. Consumer behaviour in this highly digitised society also changes. People want products that are faster, techier, and more connected.

Under such conditions, shifting to more modern tech becomes an existential necessity. This article will examine application modernisation in the UK, its drivers, and approaches.

Key Drivers for Application Modernisation in the UK

The best businesses of today are faster, smarter, and more innovative than competitors.

In pursuit of higher productivity and profits, they never stop developing new ways to improve technological performance, enhance customer experience, and speed up time to market.

Yet, while leaders push tech evolution forward, others lag behind with rigid, outdated apps that make any change difficult, slow, and costly.

To understand why application modernisation is so important, let’s review the key features of the UK’s digital environment and explain why they are the main drivers of change.

Digital transformation initiatives: Two in three companies are now undergoing digital transformation (DX). Effective DX requires change on all levels, including platform and network (adopting cloud), more flexible processes (DevOps), and shifting to a digital mindset (agile working culture). These efforts allow businesses to react better to changing consumer demand and progressive market development. Avoiding them will slow down any initiative of a business running on outdated legacy apps.
Increasing Demand for Cloud Adoption: Thanks to the flexibility, scalability, and cost reduction opportunities, the cloud today has the highest adoption rate among emerging technologies, with almost everyone (90% of companies) using it. It leaves businesses with rigid legacy applications behind, unable to compete with more innovative peers. Therefore, transforming the core of legacy applications to make them cloud-friendly or cloud-first is a necessity.
Regulatory Compliance and Security: Legacy applications often belong to the pre-GDPR era. They neither have the tech potential to comply with privacy rules nor withstand heightened security risks. Three in four people already believe that data privacy is a basic human right deserving of protection. The predicted outcome is that more laws like GDPR and the AI Act will appear in the future. Making applications compliance-friendly through modernisation will always prepare your business to stay in line with compliance.
Enhanced User Expectations: Today’s customers want websites to know intuitively what they want, prefer social media for shopping, drop a website if it loads longer than a second, and are ready to ditch a car for one with fancier voice control. Some would ask ChatGPT to recommend brands, and others would use AI to shortlist items for purchase. User behaviour is changing rapidly, and their expectations become more demanding. If an application doesn’t stand up, it is doomed to fail.
Operational Efficiency and Cost Reduction: Older applications are often ineffective and cost-consuming, while modernisation leads to considerable savings. When Swiss International Air Lines incorporated AI into their flight management system to better align flights with the weather, they saved USD 5.4 million in one year. Heathrow Airport streamlines passenger experience and improves flight planning with AI as well, which helps cut expenses and optimise operations, making the business more profitable.
Competitive Pressure: Different brands, big and small, rush to outperform their competitors in technical excellence. Modern banks explore new fintech solutions, robotaxis make their way to the streets, and new programming languages appear to build superfast applications. It is not necessary to win the competition race to be popular, but to stay in it, technical modernisation is a must.
Integration with New Technologies: The adoption of new technologies, such as AI, machine learning, and IoT, has become a new normal in the modern corporate world, making businesses tune in by improving technical integrability with new kinds of upcoming tech.
Support for Remote and Hybrid Work: One in five people already work remotely, and even more want to do the same at least part of the time. With remote and hybrid work a growing trend, companies should enhance their internal systems to provide uninterruptible operations in these conditions, including better security, connectivity, a more user-friendly interface, and application flexibility to run from different devices.
Scalability and Flexibility: Market conditions may change rapidly, like they did during the pandemic. Therefore, businesses should be ready to scale up and down vertically and horizontally to preserve resources, save money, and be prepared for any challenge. Injecting newer technologies into traditional applications will ensure a reactive or, sometimes, proactive response to market challenges.
Innovation and Growth: Since innovation is a continuous process, application modernisations allow a system to evolve seamlessly without stopping operations. This is crucial in today’s business environment, where an innovative company like Allica Bank can develop from a mere startup to a country’s fastest-growing company in just a couple of years.

If any of these are in charge of pushing ahead your app modernisation efforts, you’ll benefit from every one of the ten aspects if you go through it successfully. Let’s have a closer look at how to run modernisation effectively.

Strategies and Approaches for Successful Application Modernisation

What distinguishes a successful modernisation from a failing one?

In short, it’s the right strategy, approach and careful planning. Let’s discuss these points in greater detail and visualise the modernisation process in practice.

Modernisation starts with a plan, which includes the following stages:

Audit and assessment: during which you detect the system pain points, assess the scope of work, and set priorities depending on your company’s current financial and operational capabilities.
Risk mitigation: identify potential risks (possible downtimes, data loss, lack of knowledge or talent in place to complete the modernisation) and devise a strategy to mitigate them)
Choosing the right strategy and approach: You should decide what your company needs first, like a simple rehosting or complete rebuild, and make sure the whole systems continue to function.
Testing and Validation: During this stage, you assess the already modernised system once again, remove malfunctions, and decide on further modernisation if necessary.

Among other things, during the planning stage, you define an app modernisation approach you will use. It will depend on the level of change you need and the final goals you want to achieve. Modernisation approach will define the amount of work to undertake. As mentioned, there are several application modernisation approaches, including:

Rehosting is the fastest modernisation method, requiring almost no code change. You simply remove your application from its current environment and place it on a new hosting platform.

Replatforming is the next stage after rehosting. It requires some code change so that the platform can work on the cloud.

Refactoring—This approach makes apps easy to connect to and makes the most of the cloud-first environment, so it requires a bit more code changes compared to Replatforming.

Rearchitecting – the act structure and functionality get considerably modified to scale better.

Rebuilding – it presupposes recreating the app using newer solutions.

Selecting the right approach is an important part of building an effective strategy that ensures modernisation without interruption of business processes.

Other aspects include attention to security so that your system is not left vulnerable during modernisation, careful cost management to optimise the delivered value, uninterrupted operations to avoid unnecessary loss during modernisation, and efficient performance to sustain productivity during changes in load.

As you go from an in-depth analysis to testing without breaches, efficiency reduction, or extra costs, you might consider your application modernisation goals achieved. At the next stage, you move to validating your expectations and reaping the benefits of a modernised system.

About the author:

Iurii Luchaninov is a Solution Architect at MobiDev, responsible for delivering software modernisation consulting services focusing on innovation and business objectives.