Essential Steps for Improving Digital Experiences: The Importance of Modernising Legacy Applications

While new technologies are continually appearing and developing around us, many organisations rely on legacy systems to underpin their infrastructure and manage daily processing. While modernisation can seem daunting, updating these systems is crucial for maintaining efficiency, security, and business growth.

We recently looked at how - in a time of economic uncertainty - we can continue to focus on improving our digital experience and services, considering financial resilience alongside growth.

In this post, we’re going to consider the legacy applications at the heart of our foundations—how to strengthen, update, or replace them for your future-ready organisation.

How Important is Legacy Application Modernisation? 

Many organisations struggle with their reliance on outdated technology, leading to system failures, slow processing, poor integration, and frustrating user experiences. 

However, not every system needs replacing—careful evaluation can help you determine the best approach for modernising your legacy applications.

Digital Transformation - One Step At A Time 

Step One: Understand Your Setup

The advice is always to start by understanding your current systems. You’ll need to identify any legacy systems that hinder efficiency and growth. 

Use a structured framework—considering cost, risk, business value, and integration complexity—to prioritise which applications require updates or replacements.

Understanding dependencies ensures a strategic approach. You can then decide on the next steps and prioritise development work.

Step Two: Focus on Your Users

Technology should enhance, not hinder, workflows and outcomes. Engage your employees to identify any pain points and inefficiencies and fully understand the current situation. We talked about this in the post From Frustration to Flow, where we looked at how putting your employee at the centre of your digital experience will support your organisation as a whole.

Developing solutions with your users as a focus will improve productivity, efficiency, and employee engagement.

Step Three: Plan for the Future

You aren’t aiming to redevelop your infrastructure to bring it up to date; instead, you need to be preparing for what comes next. Unfortunately, most of us have seen at close hand projects which - by the time they deliver - are already out of date.

Aligning your work with long-term business plans is key, and future-proofing means building adaptable, scalable systems that accommodate ongoing change. 

Will you improve your current systems, extending their lifespan and perhaps developing them to support your users better? Or will you replace these legacy systems and find new solutions to serve your organisation more effectively going forward?

Whatever your decision, make sure you are developing an infrastructure for the future. 

Step Four: Build Future-Proof Systems

Low code brings together data, programming interfaces, AI, and more to enable software development easily and with flexibility, even by non-technical users, meaning low-code platforms accelerate development. 

These solutions improve agility, reduce costs, and enable rapid deployment—ideal for organisations needing quick, scalable enhancements without extensive IT resources.

Step Five: Utilise Cloud Technologies

I discussed cloud migration in the post, Building Digital Experience Efficiency. While many understand cloud storage primarily for data and backups, its benefits extend much further.

Cloud migration not only enhances security, flexibility, and cost-efficiency—it also enables hybrid solutions that balance on-premise control with cloud scalability.

For the right workloads, leveraging cloud technologies can unlock unmatched performance gains and operational agility. I’ve seen many real-world examples of organisations reducing infrastructure costs while boosting performance by transitioning select legacy applications to cloud-hosted environments.

Evaluating which workloads are best suited for the cloud is essential to maximise these benefits.

Step Six: Leaving the Past Behind

You can extend the life of your legacy systems or update them to serve you better, but for some of your legacy applications, the only solution is to replace them. If a legacy system is costly, insecure, or limiting business growth, replacement is the best option.

A structured evaluation of technical debt, ongoing maintenance, and future needs ensures informed decisions.

Key Principles for Your Organisation's Legacy

The key to any technological advancement is to think about the future:

• Adopt a 'buy once, use many times' approach for scalable solutions.

• Implement sustainable technology solutions to reduce future technical debt.

• Continuously monitor and adapt to emerging innovations

Don’t let legacy systems hold your organisation back.

Whether you are planning to extend, update, or replace your legacy applications, what comes next will be a resilient, future-ready digital experience. If you need help assessing your options, let’s talk.

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About the Author

I'm Terry Chana. I am an innovation strategist that connects customer, employee and brand experiences. My passion lies in building ecosystems to solve business problems by combining creativity and technology.