By now, many organizations have had some experience moving to the cloud—either through the development of cloud-native apps or through “lift and shifts” of legacy platforms. But not all legacy apps offer an easy migration. These holdovers are often the apps that organizations have been hesitant to migrate for a variety of reasons:

The code is outdated and no longer supported by the manufacturer.
The app’s workflow is too important to disrupt.
A migration introduces stiffer security and compliance considerations.
Compatibility issues.
Worries about data corruption or loss.

It’s a Catch-22: the danger of migration prevents you from taking action, but hesitancy can result in spiraling operational costs, increased user downtime, and continued competitive disadvantage without access to the cloud.

There is still hope for moving these legacy apps. By controlling and managing the risk involved, we are able to incrementally modernize the app and position you to gain more value in the cloud.

Replacing Your App, One Function at a Time

Our e-book, Are Your Legacy Apps Holding You Back? A 5-Step Guide to Incremental App Modernization, lays out the steps we take to ensure your difficult legacy app stays operational while we incrementally modernize it for you. One key component of our process is the “Strangler Fig” approach to app modernization.

This approach is named for a type of fig tree that grows itself around a “host” tree, wrapping its roots and vines tightly around the tree until it is no longer visible. Over time, the strangler fig completely replaces the original tree, which eventually dies away. Enquizit takes a similar approach to replacing challenging legacy apps.

How Enquizit’s Incremental App Modernization Works:

We begin by building a routine engine on top of your existing app to track data flow and determine dependencies. This does not interrupt the function of the app in any way.
After assessing how the app operates, we look for an opportunity to “peel off” a function to use as a pilot. We then create an interface layer to pass through requests for that function to a new replacement service.
This allows us to start routing some of the request traffic through the interface to a new cloud-based service.
At this stage, there are two systems running simultaneously. While this bumps operational costs for the time being, it allows us to monitor the app’s performance and troubleshoot any bugs that crop up with the new request path.
After careful assessment, we move all of the function’s traffic to the new service. This is the first “vine” in the process to replace the legacy app.

We repeat this process with other app functions, one at a time, until we have all of the app’s functions transferred over to cloud-based services. Having replaced the legacy app, we can decommission it, allowing operations to continue without interruption in the cloud-based app.

Future-Proofing Your Business Processes

With your new, modernized app, you’ll be positioned to reap the benefits of the cloud, including being able to scale, adapt, and iterate your app workflows. In addition, new open-source opportunities open up, even further reducing your reliance on subscription-based software—and the associated costs.

For more details on Enquizit’s incremental approach to app modernization, download our free e-book here.

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