Innovation Also Passes Through Application Modernization

May 24, 2024 | IT Thought Leadership Innovation Also Passes Through Application Modernization

In the ever-evolving landscape of business technology, application modernization stands as a beacon of innovation and competitive advantage. Imagine transforming aging, clunky software into sleek, agile applications that not only meet but exceed today's business demands.

This journey isn't just about updating old systems; it's about reimagining and reinvigorating your technological foundation. With the right strategies and tools, you can harness modern IT technologies and architectures to breathe new life into your legacy applications, making them more efficient, scalable, and secure.

In this context, legacy applications, i.e., those developed in the past and/or based on obsolete technologies, are the main candidates to undergo upgrade and modernization processes to meet the current and future needs of organizations. The main reasons for companies to embark on a path of modernizing their applications are related to concepts of agility, speed, scalability, efficiency, sustainability, security and integration.

Rewriting existing applications by taking advantage of new technologies, the cloud, modularization of monolithic applications into microservices, serverless architectures, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, is an approach to modernization that requires precise intervention strategies.

Application modernization is not simple. on the contrary, it is a complex process that requires a careful analysis of all the application components to be updated, from the language, even dated, to the parameters used, to the interfaces used. It is therefore essential to have knowledge of the application map in order to understand which applications need to be intervened on with upgrades and improvements, and likewise, to identify priorities for intervention according to a careful cost-benefit analysis.

Modernization in two steps

Software intelligence can help organizations in this process by offering solutions that enable them to approach aplication modernization in two steps: the first with a cognitive assessment of the application portfolio using CAST Highlight and the second, more “deep insights” with CAST Imaging, to get application details and a navigation within the technical components that make it up.

A bird's eye view

CAST Highlight is the fastest and most automated answer with which to have an application map of an entire software portfolio. The portal dashboard provides an immediate view of application health with indicators of Software Health, Cloud Maturity, Open Source Safety and Green Impact.

CAST_HIghlight_baseline applicativa

The Software Health provides details for each application's Software Resiliency, Agility and Elegance, Business Impact, FTE, Technical Debt, Software Maintenance Estimate, Files, Locs, Technologies, and much more information for all applications in the portfolio.

Cloud Maturity describes the maturity of applications for their migration to the cloud, highlighting components that can be Blockers or Boosters for cloud migration and providing recommendations.

CAST_Highlight_Cloud_Maturity

Diving into the depths of applications

To modify or rewrite an application's software, it is essential to know its architecture, components and objects. CAST Imaging allows, through rapid discovery, a complete view of the application, highlighting its objects, relationships, dependencies, quality violations and vulnerabilities.

The web interface makes it easy to navigate through the various available default and customizable views that provide system engineers with tools to immediately learn and learn how applications work and interact with each other.

CAST_Imaging_Application_Discovery

The main views cover discovery of application architecture, frameworks, technologies, third-party components, external references, RDBMS inventory of tables and objects, services, application modules, APIs and their accesses, as well as the ability to investigate objects and transactions.

CAST_Imaging_Application_Discovery_1CAST_Imaging_Application_Discovery_2

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to browsing with standard views, CAST Imaging provides options to create filters, searches, custom views, extract lists of objects, produce reports, insert tags, notes, and more to provide the end user with any useful information to learn about applications.

CAST_Imaging_Application_Discovery_3Safely governing all applications

Software intelligence is the ideal solution for companies that want to modernize their applications. With CAST Highlight and CAST Imaging, developers have the tools to learn about applications, learn how they work, and understand where to intervene; as a result, governance will also be able to address application modernization more confidently through structured and targeted processes.