Extending the Life of Your Legacy Applications

Legacy applications are often seen as a burden, limiting an organization's agility and flexibility. However, with the right approach, you can breathe new life into these systems, extending their lifespan by a decade or more!

The Challenge: As per Jim Duggan, Research VP at Gartner, without active management, legacy applications can become a significant hindrance to an organization's growth and adaptability.

The Solution: Gartner's T-I-M-E model (Tolerate – Innovate – Migrate - Eliminate) offers a strategic approach to assess applications based on their business value, cost, risk, and technical efficiency. This model guides organizations on which applications to tolerate, modernize, or eliminate.

The TIME acronym stands for:

• Tolerate: Applications that are not strategic but necessary for the business.
• Invest: Applications that are strategic and require further investment.
• Migrate: Applications that are less strategic and can be replaced with more modern alternatives.
• Eliminate: Applications that no longer meet business requirements and can be retired.

Modern iPaaS to the Rescue

The modern iPaaS offers a modernization tool for legacy systems. It acts as:

• A host and engine for services like SOA and microservices.
• A host and engine for processes such as BPMN processes and rules.

By building services on top of existing enterprise applications, modern iPaaS can transform legacy systems, pushing them towards a more maintainable state. Additionally, with its Process Integration (BPM) capabilities, modern iPaaS can introduce new rules and process flows that the old legacy application might not have had, further enhancing its value.

Services as Facades

One of the key strategies is to use services as facades. This approach involves creating an intermediate layer that can handle the demands of modern business services, effectively decoupling the operative data from the underlying legacy system. This not only modernizes the system but also opens up opportunities for future architectural approaches.

The same works with microservices too. And remember, a modern iPaaS can act as a platform for those microservices. For example, Frends iPaaS enables the Digital Integration Hub approach, where each service can have its own data storage, making them fully uncoupled from the monoliths.

You can read more about the Digital Integration Hub approach here.

How to gracefully Eliminate the system?

What if there are external systems from your own company or business partners calling your system? With facade APIs, you can hide and box the system to be migrated, and one data flow or API at a time and route them to the new system. This way, you can remove the system gracefully without the callers knowing that the underlying system has been replaced.

In conclusion, while legacy systems might seem like a challenge, with the right tools and strategies, they can be transformed, offering years of extended utility. If you're grappling with legacy systems and looking for solutions, consider exploring platforms like modern iPaaS.