Fuelling Business Growth with Application Modernization: Latest Trends, Technologies, and Benefits

Q: How can FPT Software help us overcome limits in modernizing apps?

FPT Software helps organizations with limited budget, staff, or expertise by providing specialized teams, proven frameworks, and partner ecosystems for app modernization. They assess legacy estates, design tailored roadmaps, and deliver migration, modernization, and managed services to reduce risk and speed outcomes.

In a digital economy where legacy systems have shifted from backbone to bottleneck, application modernization—migrating to cloud, decomposing monoliths into microservices, and embracing automation—is now essential to improve scalability, security, costs, and productivity. Powered by cloud, containers, microservices, AI/ML, and low-code platforms, modern apps are increasingly cloud-native and user-centric, while FPT helps organizations overcome budget, talent, and expertise constraints with tailored modernization services that build resilience and sustain competitive advantage.

Written by

FPT Software

Published on

October 11, 2024

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In today's fast-paced digital world, organizations can no longer rely on outdated technology. Legacy applications, once the backbone of many businesses, are increasingly becoming a liability that holds back growth and innovation.

To address this challenge, companies need to modernize their legacy applications by updating the underlying infrastructure, internal architecture, and application features to meet evolving market demands. By migrating legacy systems to cloud environments and breaking monolithic applications into microservices, organizations can unlock their full competitive potential and future-proof their application landscape.

Why should businesses modernize legacy applications?

As technology rapidly evolves, organizations can no longer rely on aging systems without risking efficiency, agility, and competitiveness. Modernizing legacy applications is now a strategic necessity, helping businesses overcome technical constraints, reduce operational costs, and better support long-term growth.

Modernization is widely recognized at the leadership level. As technology advances, updating legacy systems is increasingly seen as essential rather than optional. In fact, 87% of business leaders believe that application modernization is crucial for long-term success [1]. Yet 31% of current IT infrastructures still rely on outdated legacy systems, and only 33% of technology in large enterprises meets the demands of modernization [2].

Legacy applications create significant challenges for modern organizations. They are difficult to update, expensive to scale, and often incompatible with contemporary platforms and tools. Because these systems were designed in a different technological era, they typically lack the flexibility, integration capabilities, and performance required to support today's digital experiences.

By modernizing these applications, companies can address these limitations and unlock new value. Modernization enables them to support new business models, respond faster to changing customer expectations, and maintain a competitive edge while optimizing costs. In doing so, organizations transform their technology foundation from a constraint into a driver of sustainable growth.

Key Benefits of Application Modernization

Application modernization enables organizations to unlock a wide range of strategic benefits, from greater technical agility to measurable business outcomes. Below are four of the most important advantages it can deliver:

Enhanced Scalability

Modern applications, typically built with microservices and deployed in the cloud, allow businesses to scale far more easily than monolithic systems. This flexibility lets organizations adjust resources on demand and integrate seamlessly with other tools and services. As a result, they can roll out updates and improvements without the costly downtime often associated with traditional applications.

The ability to scale is one of the primary concerns for organizations: 94% identify scalability as a key driver for modernization, and 74% use it as a measure of success [3].

Improved Security and Compliance

Security is another major driving force behind application modernization, with 72% of organizations citing it as a key success criterion [3]. Legacy systems are often riddled with vulnerabilities that are difficult and costly to address.

By modernizing applications, businesses can integrate the latest security capabilities, such as real-time threat detection and advanced data encryption. This strengthens their ability to stay compliant with evolving regulations and reduces the risk of data breaches. In fact, 58% of organizations report already experiencing improved security as a result of application modernization initiatives [3].

Reduced Operational Costs

Cloud environments provide a more cost-effective alternative to expensive on-premise physical infrastructure. By adopting a pay-as-you-go model, businesses can align spending with actual usage, avoiding overprovisioning and eliminating unnecessary costs while tailoring services to their specific needs.

According to Microsoft, application modernization can reduce infrastructure costs by 40% while delivering a 228% return on investment [4].

Increased Productivity

Modern application platforms enable businesses to automate numerous operational tasks, including load balancing, data backup, and performance monitoring and analysis. This automation frees up teams to focus on higher-value, more innovative work rather than routine maintenance.

Modernization can also enhance application performance, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall operational efficiency. Together, these factors support higher productivity, faster time-to-market, and a stronger competitive edge.

Driving Technologies

Several core technologies sit at the center of application modernization and make it possible to transform legacy systems at scale:

Cloud Computing: In any modernization initiative, cloud computing is usually front and center. Moving applications to cloud environments enables organizations to benefit from scalability, cost-efficiency, and greater flexibility in how resources are provisioned and managed.
Containers: Containers package applications together with all their dependencies so they can run consistently across different environments. This approach improves portability and efficiency, and it simplifies managing applications in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud setups.
Microservices: Microservices decompose monolithic applications into smaller, independent services that can be deployed, operated, and updated separately. This architecture supports long-term flexibility in development, testing, and scaling, allowing teams to change specific parts of an application without disrupting the entire system.
Automation: Automation is critical for operating modern applications reliably at scale. It helps orchestrate streamlined workflows to keep modernized applications running smoothly while minimizing manual intervention and reducing operational risk.

Latest Application Modernization Trends to Watch

As technology continues to evolve, application modernization is driving several notable trends that are reshaping how organizations design, build, and deliver software. Below are four of the most impactful trends you should be aware of:

Low-Code and No-Code Development

Low-code and no-code platforms are transforming application development by enabling both professional developers and non-technical users to build applications more quickly. These platforms provide visual interfaces, prebuilt components, and automation that significantly reduce manual coding effort.

By 2025, 70% of new applications are expected to be developed using low-code or no-code platforms [5]. This trend helps businesses close the talent gap, accelerate delivery, and empower business teams to create solutions that more closely match their operational needs.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Integration

AI and ML are becoming integral components of application modernization, allowing organizations to automate decision-making, enhance user experiences, and offer highly personalized services. By embedding these capabilities directly into applications, businesses can extract more value from their data.

AI- and ML-enabled applications also deliver more advanced data analysis and prediction capabilities, helping teams anticipate trends and respond faster. It is forecast that AI-driven applications will grow by 20% in the coming years [6], underscoring their rising importance in modern application portfolios.

Cloud-Native Development

Cloud-native applications are designed specifically to run in cloud environments and typically rely on microservices architectures and containerization. This approach makes it easier to deploy, update, and scale applications in a flexible and resilient way.

By 2024, 90% of all new applications are expected to be cloud-native [7]. These applications are generally more reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, making cloud-native development a central element of many modernization strategies.

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs)

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are web applications that behave like native apps across different devices and platforms. They combine the reach of the web with features traditionally associated with native mobile applications.

Thanks to fast loading times, responsiveness, offline capabilities, and smooth interaction, PWAs provide a seamless user experience. As a result, they offer businesses the opportunity to reach a much wider audience, regardless of hardware differences or operating systems.

Strengthen business resilience with FPT’s Application Services

Application modernization offers significant benefits, yet many organizations struggle to realize its full value. Limited budgets, lean IT teams, and gaps in technical expertise often make it difficult to secure the resources needed for a successful transformation. As a result, modernization initiatives risk delays and may fall short of expectations.

With a large pool of seasoned experts, cutting-edge technologies, and an extensive network of global partners, FPT helps businesses design and implement tailored modernization solutions that fit their specific needs. This partnership approach enables organizations to accelerate their modernization journey and stay ahead of the competition.

Learn more about FPT’s application modernization services here: FPT Application Services

Frequently Asked Questions

What does application modernization involve for legacy systems?

Application modernization means upgrading legacy applications’ infrastructure, architecture, and features so they align with current business and user demands. It often includes moving to cloud platforms, breaking monoliths into microservices, and updating security, scalability, and automation to remove growth and innovation constraints.

Why should our organization modernize legacy applications now?

Modernizing now reduces the risk of outages, security gaps, and high maintenance costs that come with aging systems. With most leaders seeing modernization as vital, staying on legacy technology means higher technical debt, slower change, and falling behind competitors that are already replatforming to modern stacks.

What concrete business benefits can app modernization deliver?

Modernization delivers elastic cloud scalability, stronger security and compliance, and lower infrastructure spend through pay-as-you-go models. It also increases productivity via automation and performance gains, cutting downtime and speeding releases so IT teams can focus more on innovation than on maintaining legacy code.

Which core technologies should we adopt for app modernization?

Key modernization enablers are cloud platforms for elastic compute, containers for portability, and microservices for modular, independently deployable services. Automation underpins all of this, orchestrating deployments, scaling, and operations so large, distributed applications remain reliable without heavy manual effort.

What are the latest trends shaping application modernization?

Modernization is being reshaped by low-code and no-code platforms, AI and ML integration, cloud-native architectures, and Progressive Web Apps. These trends accelerate delivery, improve user experiences, and make apps more scalable and cost-efficient, helping organizations respond faster to market demands.

How can FPT help us overcome limits in modernizing apps?

FPT helps organizations with limited budget, staff, or expertise by providing specialized teams, proven frameworks, and partner ecosystems for app modernization. They assess legacy estates, design tailored roadmaps, and deliver migration, modernization, and managed services to reduce risk and speed outcomes.