A legacy application is an application which is based on an outdated technology. Most legacy applications exist because they are critical in the day to day functions of a business.
Common problems with legacy applications
Support - Legacy applications may no longer receive the required levels of support and maintenance as the developers responsible for the application may have left the organisation or the legacy application may be a discontinued third party product. Sometimes, support for a legacy applications can be expensive as they are niche and experienced support staff may be hard to find.
Integration- Legacy applications don't integrate well with new technology and it may not be possible to customise them to integrate with new solutions.
Performance- Legacy applications are built in a monolithic way so they do not scale efficiently resulting in slow or inconsistent performance. Users often complain about performance issues with legacy applications affecting business operations.
Technical Debt- Legacy applications may have technical debt which may not possible to address due to their limitations.
Security - Legacy applications may contain known or unknown security vulnerabilities.
These problems can be addressed through application modernisation. Application modernisation offers the following benefits:
1. Scalable cloud based applications which improve performance.
2. Use of new technologies for which support is easily available.
3. Easy integration by using loosely coupled services.
4. Enhanced security using the latest authentication and authorization techniques.
5. Enhanced user experience using a responsive front end.