Gartner predicts that every dollar invested in digital business innovation through to the end of 2020 will require enterprises to spend at least three times that to continuously modernize the legacy application portfolio.

Spending that money effectively will require application leaders to carefully select one of the seven different modernization approaches.

 

1. Encapsulate: To leverage and extend an application’s features and value, encapsulate data and functions in the application and make them available as services via an application programming interface (API). Implementation specifics and knowledge are hidden behind the interface.

2. Rehost: Redeploy an application component to another physical, virtual or cloud infrastructure without recompiling, altering the application code, or modifying features and functions.

3. Replatform: Migrate an application component to a new runtime platform. Make minimal changes to code to adapt to the new platform, but don’t change the code structure or the features and functions it provides.

4. Refactor: Restructure and optimize existing code without changing its external behavior to remove technical debt and to improve the component’s features and structure.

5. Rearchitect: Materially alter the application code so you can shift it to a new application architecture and fully exploit new and better capabilities of the application platform.

6. Rebuild: Rebuild or rewrite the application component from scratch while preserving its scope and specifications.

7. Replace: Eliminate the former application component altogether and replace it, taking new requirements and needs into account.