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How we use and interact with software applications has transformed dramatically in today’s landscape. Businesses and developers must constantly adapt and enhance their applications to stay relevant and competitive. This process of adaptation and improvement is precisely what cloud application modernization is all about.
In this article, we apply our expertise in app modernization cloud consulting to explain the essential strategies and best practices that lie at the heart of effective cloud application modernization. By delving into these principles, organizations can ensure their applications remain agile, secure, scalable, and efficient.
Under application modernization, we understand the process of updating legacy applications. It includes their architecture, infrastructure, and features. The final goal is to leverage the latest technical innovations and make your app and the entire business more efficient and profitable. It doesn’t just improve the application but many processes in an organization.
Cloud-native architecture is an approach designed to fully leverage the cloud computing model. It represents a combination of methodologies from cloud services, DevOps, and software development principles. Cloud-native applications are reliable, scalable, and perform better. Сloud-native application modernization allows you to quickly bring your app to the market.
The key benefit of application modernization in cloud is its ability to extend the life of applications that can’t be replaced or removed from the field. An additional benefit is the improvement of additional technologies and processes. Those are cloud computing, DevOps, etc.
Cloud application modernization isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic pivot. Enterprises must be agile, scalable, and resilient. Legacy systems, often characterized by monolithic architectures and on-premise infrastructure, can severely impede innovation, slow down time-to-market, and inflate operational costs. Modernization initiatives are therefore a critical investment in a company’s future, enabling faster iteration on products, superior customer experiences, and the ability to leverage cutting-edge technologies like AI and machine learning that are inherently cloud-native. It’s about building a foundation for continuous innovation and sustainable growth.
By modernizing your application, you achieve better agility, improved UX, and cost efficiencies. Legacy app logic is complex, and adding new capabilities and updates takes ages. While you’re spending time doing this, your competitors are winning a market by offering modern and up-to-date capabilities. App modernization opens access to these advantages.
Modernize your legacy applications for the cloud and unlock new possibilities
Another benefit of modernizing your apps is improving the experience for external and internal users. In a competitive market, companies win by offering performant applications with the best user experience. Tech-savvy users gravitate to products that have the latest technologies and capabilities. With new offerings entering the market daily, you must work smart to maximize profit and increase market share. Achieving these goals with legacy applications is incredibly challenging.
Finally, cloud-native application modernization can reduce costs and improve operating efficiency. Modernizing applications to a microservices architecture makes components smaller and loosely coupled. It means it becomes easier to deploy and scale these components independently. It leads to improved release velocity, stability, and availability.
Scaling legacy applications is challenging and expensive. But it’s necessary if they don’t meet users’ demands anymore. The concept of monolith applications implies scaling it as one thing. Improving a single area requires complex refactoring or changing the entire system.
On the other hand, modern applications consist of many components responsible for different functionalities. These components assure reuse throughout your organization and can be operated independently.
Before moving to the app modernization process, decide on the strategy. It has to align with your company’s small and big goals. You can migrate to the cloud and shift your apps. Or you can change the code of your legacy apps.
An app modernization strategy can look different, depending on numerous factors, but it always includes these three steps: identifying pain points, analyzing user interactions, and designing solutions. Here are six of the most popular strategies for these days:
Rehosting, or “lift-and-shift,” means moving existing applications to cloud infrastructure with minimal changes. It’s quick, cost-effective, and reduces dependence on on-premises hardware. However, while it offers immediate savings, it doesn’t take advantage of cloud-native features like elasticity or advanced automation. Many organizations use rehosting as a first cloud application modernization step before deeper transformations.
Rearchitecting restructures applications to align with cloud-native patterns. For instance, monolithic systems may be broken into modular services, making them easier to scale and maintain. Although more complex than rehosting, rearchitecting enables businesses to leverage cloud services such as managed databases, distributed caching, and automated scaling. The payoff is a more future-proof application architecture.
When legacy systems can’t keep pace with modern requirements, rebuilding is often the only solution. This involves designing and coding an entirely new application using up-to-date languages, frameworks, and cloud-native practices. While it requires significant resources, rebuilding creates apps optimized for innovation, performance, and long-term scalability, often unlocking capabilities that weren’t awailable with the legacy stack.
Replatforming makes selective improvements, like switching to a managed cloud database or adopting container orchestration, without rewriting the entire system. It strikes a balance between speed and modernization depth. Organizations often choose replatforming to reduce operational overhead while gradually introducing cloud-native components into their stack.
Refactoring is about rewriting parts of the codebase to improve efficiency, readability, and maintainability. For cloud applications, this might mean optimizing functions for distributed systems, streamlining APIs, or restructuring code to better handle scale. While invisible to end users, refactoring reduces technical debt and ensures systems remain reliable as they grow.
The name gives a hint – this is the practice of replacing one app with another. It sounds radical, but sometimes, it’s the only way to meet business needs and achieve goals. An outdated monolith app might be unable to do this, and the abovementioned strategies might be helpless.
Replacement is a cloud application modernization method that involves retiring legacy applications and adopting commercial SaaS solutions or modern off-the-shelf software. This is often the most cost-efficient path for systems where differentiation is less critical, such as payroll or HR tools. Replacement allows organizations to focus internal resources on strategic applications that truly add business value.
A successful cloud modernization journey hinges on a meticulously crafted roadmap. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor; it requires a deep understanding of your current application portfolio, business objectives, and risk appetite. The roadmap should clearly define the scope of each modernization wave, prioritize applications based on business criticality and technical feasibility, and outline the chosen strategies (rehost, replatform, refactor, rebuild, replace). Furthermore, it must include a detailed resource plan, budget allocation, and a timeline with clear milestones. Crucially, a robust roadmap integrates comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation strategies, ensuring that potential disruptions to ongoing business operations are minimized and managed proactively.
After knowing your strategy, you need some factors to remember while running the process. They will help you to reach the maximum smoothness and efficiency.
The more your app is tied to your daily operations, the more risky the project might be. But it doesn’t mean you have to stop. Ask yourself the following questions:
If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, app modernization should soon be part of your business strategy.
Understanding your system’s current state and defining the requirements is essential. This list must be very accurate, especially for commercial off-the-shelf products.
When scoping an update or upgrade, compare your modified environment to an untouched piece of the code to understand your modified footprint. The following analysis of code and user settings will help you identify opportunities to retire unnecessary code and objects.
Some things can help you reduce development time and minimize the risk. If your systems are still on-premises, decide what makes the most sense to your business — staying on-premises, moving cloud, or hybrid. Uncertainty can be an obstacle.
If you don’t have the in-house skills to carry out a project, find a reliable partner able to do so. Thoroughly calculate the budget and define timeframes.
The devil is always in the detail. Addressing these challenges initially will reduce risk and development timelines and improve efficiency.
Testing might be unexpectedly time-consuming. For significant upgrades, it requires over 50% of the project timeline. QAs can be tempted to test everything, and it’s not always the best practice. If you have an image of the net changes, you might opt for testing only necessary things.
Functional testing is the first candidate for process automation. Establish a catalog of test scripts so that you can run and report on tests faster. Combine the scripts to test end-to-end workflows.
Beyond the technical intricacies, cloud application modernization demands significant organizational change management. A common challenge is the ‘talent gap’—the need for new skills in cloud architecture, DevOps, and specific cloud platforms. Organizations must invest in upskilling their existing teams through training programs and certifications, or strategically bring in external expertise. Equally important is fostering a ‘cloud-native mindset’ throughout the organization. This involves shifting from traditional siloed operations to a more collaborative, agile culture where cross-functional teams embrace automation, continuous delivery, and shared responsibility for application performance and security. Addressing these human factors proactively is as vital as any technical decision for sustained success.
In any cloud modernization initiative, security and compliance cannot be afterthoughts; they must be foundational pillars. While cloud providers offer robust infrastructure security, organizations bear the responsibility for securing their applications, data, and configurations within that environment (the Shared Responsibility Model). This necessitates a ‘security-by-design’ approach, integrating security controls and best practices at every stage of the modernization lifecycle—from architecture planning and development to deployment and operations. Key considerations include robust identity and access management (IAM), data encryption (in transit and at rest), network security segmentation, continuous vulnerability scanning, and adherence to industry-specific regulatory compliance frameworks (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS). Proactive security posture management is non-negotiable for protecting valuable assets and maintaining trust.
To modernize the app, we usually take the following steps:
Plan a new architecture.
Decide how to restructure the application to run as a set of distributed microservices. You must know the number of microservices you’re willing to create, their structure, and their organization.
Refactor the application.
Refactoring is a so-called redesign of the source code to make the app run as microservices. This is the most complicated and time-consuming part.
Create a new hosting environment.
Decide how to host the modernized app. You can deploy each microservice in a container or use serverless functions to host some app parts.
Configure IAM.
IAM is a set of policies and technologies to ensure that the right users access technology resources appropriately. You need them to protect your app.
Plan backups.
Backing up microservices is a complicated process. The way to do so depends on how you host them.
Run the test.
Deploy your application into an updated environment. Then, test it to make sure it works as expected.
Move to production.
Put the app into production by directing requests to it and shutting off the monolithic instance of the application.
Cloud modernization allows you to utilize cloud-native architectures and cloud services fully. For instance, you might refactor a monolithic application to use a microservices architecture. The app can consume cloud hosting resources more efficiently when deployed as microservices.
It’s also easier to scale and update microservices and manage them using an orchestrator. A modernized app can take fuller advantage of the cloud than an app migrated to the cloud as it was, without any changes.
1. Modernizing an on-premises app by overhauling it to take advantage of the cloud, then moving it to the cloud.
2. Modernizing an app hosted in the cloud but not yet optimized for the cloud.
3. Modernizing a legacy app and keeping it on-premises but hosting it in a cloud-native on-premises environment.
Expert strategies and benefits in our latest article
Legacy systems accumulate inefficiencies over time: outdated frameworks, hardcoded dependencies, and fragile workarounds that no one wants to touch. Those are called technical debt and slow down innovation and raises maintenance costs. The first step is a structured audit to uncover where the debt lies. Prioritizing high-impact areas allows teams to refactor or replace components without overwhelming resources, steadily reducing complexity while, at the same time, adding long-term value.
Moving applications to the cloud shifts the security perimeter and introduces new vulnerabilities. Misconfigured resources, weak identity controls, and insecure APIs are common pitfalls. Building security into the process from the start is essential. With DevSecOps, safeguards like automated compliance scans, penetration testing, and zero-trust access policies are applied continuously. This ensures that cloud application modernization improves security posture rather than creating new risks, which is critical in strictly regulated industries.
Enterprises rarely modernize in a vacuum. Core systems such as ERPs, CRMs, or IoT platforms need to keep working while modernization unfolds. Without careful planning, introducing a new service can break established workflows. Robust API gateways, middleware, and stress-testing help bridge old and new environments. Early integration design reduces downtime, prevents data silos, and makes gradual modernization far more manageable.
Cloud-native application modernization demands skills that many teams don’t yet have, like container orchestration, serverless design, or CI/CD automation. This talent gap often stalls projects. Successful organizations tackle the issue on two fronts: reskilling existing staff with training and certifications, and supplementing with external expertise where needed. Beyond technical knowledge, fostering a culture that embraces automation and iterative delivery is just as important for long-term success.
Modernization can be costly, but deferring it usually leads to higher expenses through inefficiency, outages, and missed opportunities. To justify investment, each phase should tie directly to measurable outcomes, such as lowering infrastructure spend, improving uptime, or accelerating time-to-market. Incremental application modernization approach allows businesses to deliver early wins, build executive confidence, and manage costs while still moving toward full transformation.
Let’s define the main tips to complement everything we’ve said about cloud application modernization and its value. They rely on our experience in app modernization and can help you make the process smooth and easier to navigate.
Understand the purpose. Start with your business goals, big and small, and then build a modernization strategy to achieve your objectives. Don’t waste time and other resources on modernization for the sake of progress. With an understanding of your ‘why,’ you can make choices that solve your business needs.
Assess resources and partners. Identify the workloads; involve stakeholders and those IT specialists with expertise in the legacy application and the cloud you’re moving to. Define, develop, and execute the optimal migration and modernization path. Find a reliable partner providing cloud app modernization services if you need one.
Analyze your starting point. Assess your app to understand its architecture, dependencies, and requirements. Identify components to migrate to the cloud and to modify, and only then decide on the strategy.
Do a holistic modernization. Consider modernizing underlying business processes, including UX and agility. This way, your business vision, goals, and instruments become more aligned. It also makes you more competitive in the market.
Plan for a long run. There are better options than creating a one-size-fits-all catalog of services and forcing apps to align. You better opt for a continuous, modular approach that enables permanent modernization and gradually aligning changes with business and technology goals.
The completion of a modernization project is merely the end of the beginning. To truly maximize the value of your modernized cloud applications, a commitment to continuous optimization and innovation is essential. This involves establishing robust monitoring and observability frameworks to track performance, identify bottlenecks, and ensure cost efficiency (FinOps). Leveraging the agility of the cloud, teams can then implement practices like A/B testing, canary deployments, and feature flags to iterate rapidly on new functionalities. The goal is to transform your application landscape into an engine for ongoing business value, constantly adapting to market demands and exploiting new cloud services to maintain a competitive edge.
Every modernization initiative should begin with a clear understanding of the current application state. This involves assessing code quality, mapping dependencies, evaluating infrastructure, and gathering input from stakeholders. A well-structured assessment highlights pain points, identifies critical risks, and helps determine whether rehosting, refactoring, or a complete rebuild is the most effective path. Skipping this step often leads to misaligned priorities.
Data is the backbone of any application, and moving it is often the most complex part of modernization. A successful strategy focuses on maintaining data integrity, minimizing downtime, and ensuring seamless continuity for users. Techniques such as phased transfers, replication, and extensive validation testing reduce the risk of corruption or loss. Organizations should also establish rollback plans to safeguard against unexpected failures during migration.
Modernization without security in mind can create vulnerabilities that outweigh the benefits. Adopting a DevSecOps approach ensures security is built into every stage, from design and coding through deployment and monitoring. This includes automated compliance checks, secure coding standards, and continuous monitoring. Treating security as a design principle rather than an afterthought helps organizations strengthen resilience while meeting regulatory requirements.
If not managed properly, Cloud flexibility can lead to spiraling costs. FinOps practices combine financial accountability with technical optimization to monitor usage, align spending with business value, and ensure resources are used efficiently. Continuous monitoring also allows teams to track performance in real time, quickly identify inefficiencies, and adapt to changing business needs. This turns modernization into a sustainable, long-term improvement rather than a one-time project.
Attempting a full-scale modernization in one effort is risky, expensive, and often disruptive. An incremental approach, which means breaking projects into manageable phases, allows organizations to deliver value faster, adapt based on feedback, and reduce risk. Agile sprints, minimum viable products (MVPs), and phased rollouts ensure steady progress while maintaining alignment with business objectives. Incremental modernization also helps build organizational confidence by demonstrating measurable results along the way.
Containers package applications and their dependencies into lightweight, portable units that run consistently across environments. Docker has become the de facto standard for containerization, while Kubernetes provides orchestration, managing deployment, scaling, networking, and failover automatically. Together, they enable microservices architectures, faster releases, and better resource utilization.
For modernization projects, containers offer a clear migration path: legacy apps can be containerized without a full rewrite, while new services can be developed cloud-native from the start. Organizations adopting Kubernetes often see improvements in resilience, as workloads can self-heal and scale dynamically.
Serverless computing takes abstraction a step further. Developers focus solely on writing code, while the cloud provider manages infrastructure, scaling, and availability. Platforms such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions allow applications to respond to events in real time without idle costs.
This model is particularly attractive for workloads with unpredictable traffic, like healthcare apps processing patient data in bursts or retail platforms handling seasonal spikes. Serverless reduces operational overhead and aligns costs with actual usage, but it introduces limitations around execution time, cold starts, and vendor lock-in.
Modernization is very much about how teams work. DevOps emphasizes automation and collaboration between development and operations, while Agile fosters iterative delivery and responsiveness to change. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) extends these principles with a focus on system reliability, performance, and scalability.
When combined, these methodologies create a framework for continuous improvement. Agile breaks work into small, manageable iterations. DevOps ensures automated testing, deployment, and monitoring. SRE enforces service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to balance innovation with stability. Together, they help enterprises modernize without sacrificing uptime, making it possible to deliver new features quickly while meeting strict availability requirements.
Low-code and no-code platforms have emerged as accelerators in the modernization landscape. They provide visual development environments where business users or less technical staff can build apps with drag-and-drop interfaces. Popular platforms like Microsoft Power Apps, OutSystems, and Mendix enable organizations to roll out prototypes or department-level solutions in weeks instead of months.
For modernization, these tools help bridge resource gaps, reduce pressure on engineering teams, and allow IT to focus on more complex, mission-critical projects. While low-code/no-code won’t replace custom development for large-scale systems, it excels in building internal tools, workflows, and customer-facing apps that require rapid iteration. Practical best practices for implementation
Application Modernization is non-negotiable regarding enhancing agility and adopting a cloud migration strategy. The right approach can skyrocket your modernization process. At the same time, the wrong one may cause a massive loss for your company and make the app vulnerable.
We understand how critical your app is to the success of your organization. We also know how complicated and expensive it might be to maintain a legacy app.
At Blackthorn Vision, we provide cloud application modernization services to modernize and actualize your app to help your business meet its goals. We use a cost-efficient approach and develop a strategy that is a golden mine between your capabilities and expectations. Contact us to transform your traditional app into advanced tools and technologies.
As you can tell from the name, migration implies moving your app to the cloud. The approach has another name — lift-and-shift, which gives an even better explanation. Modernization includes this option, but you can improve your app and host it on-premise if it makes more sense.
Cloud migration is a one-time jump from the existing to the new. Modernization provides a phased transition to new technology.
In most cases, traditional applications are monoliths. Most of them run on a mainframe or a client/server environment. In most cases, you need additional hardware to upgrade or scale up data storage and support services.
Cloud-native applications are hosted and run in the cloud and benefit from a cloud computing model. Cloud-native applications, unlike traditional applications, use a microservices architecture.
