What are reasons to modernize applications now? Because modernizing your applications allows you to focus on what really matters — providing value to your customers — while reducing the risk of downtime, lowering operational costs, and being able to quickly respond to changing customer, business, and regulatory demands.

The current COVID 19 health pandemic has quickly demonstrated that as most businesses shift to remote work this can be a challenge for the many companies with legacy applications that require on-premises management. It has also highlighted the fact that there are significant business risks and productivity losses from relying on applications that are built on technology that is either out-of-support or will be soon.

1. Keep Your Customers

If your staff is spending too much time navigating and maintaining legacy applications, it’s a distraction. Time spent managing, maintaining, troubleshooting and making decisions about legacy applications is time spent away from innovation, customer service, and moving toward digital transformation. Another reason to modernize applications is that you allow your staff to shift their focus back to what really matters, which is seamlessly serving your customers.

2. Reduce Risks

Many legacy systems are built on older technology that often pre-dates the individuals assigned to maintain them. Over the years, a patchwork of updates and customizations have made them more complex, vulnerable, less secure, and more costly to maintain. And to make it more daunting, older technologies put more burden on IT staff to maintain them without outside support.

For example, as of January 14, 2020, support for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ended. That means regular security updates have also ended, putting the infrastructure and applications at risk. Modern, cloud-based applications provide more agility, security and flexibility as your company continues to adapt in the future. (for more information on how to start your WS2008 migration project, download the Gartner report: How to Prepare for Windows Server 2008 End of Support.)

3. Reduce Operational Costs

Gartner analysts report that 80% or more of annual IT budgets are typically spent on operating, maintaining and managing legacy systems. Having legacy applications eat up the majority of your IT budget leaves little room for innovation and new technology adoption to thrive in a modern business environment.

Instead of dealing with legacy hardware and software consuming your technology budget— take the opportunity now to turn your applications into agile, flexible, and highly available drivers of growth.

4. Improve your Agility

What if you were to come up with a new way to serve your customers on Monday and make it a reality just days or even hours later? What if you could scale resources as needed to adjust to capacity needs on the fly or implement new security measures to meet changing compliance regulations — and you could do either from anywhere in the world, inside or outside of your office?

Modernized applications allow you to do all this and much more, equipping you to adapt rapidly to both planned and unplanned changes. They allow you to efficiently respond to new business opportunities, adapt to future market demands and innovate to disrupt your industry.

So, Where Do You Start?

The first steps forward are to assess your current systems and identify the best candidates for modernization, then define the modernization plan right for your company — one that takes into account every angle before implementation — from business goals and objectives to regulatory requirements, company policies, and the best cloud technologies and architecture to use.

Watch our webinar replay on of how you can get a better handle on your current application environment and take charge of your plan to modernize.

You’ll come away with some new ideas and real-world takeaways on the best approach to modernization.

Watch replay here.