Application Modernization & Migration Services

Legacy systems, first established decades ago, still provide business value today, but carry high costs, operational risks and are no longer a good fit for a modern, agile IT. Organizations are often reluctant to replace their legacy systems because updating them is perceived to be costly and potentially disruptive. Our Application Modernization and Migration team helps companies understand, transform, and modernize their legacy applications to reduce costs and operational risks, accelerate their digital transformation, and take advantage of modern technologies such as cloud and containerization.
 

Bring new life to old technology

Legacy systems built around mainframe technology and using outdated languages, such as COBOL, PL/I, Natural, or CA Gen, remain at the core of many organizations. These systems are expensive to run and create major challenges for any digitalization or cloud migration initiative. Updating them can be disruptive. Our approach to legacy modernization is powered by class-leading, proprietary toolset, Deloitte innoWake™, that provides a fully automated, low-risk modernization solution that transforms your legacy applications into a modern technology stack.
 

Why are others leaving the mainframe?

Many organizations are facing the same challenges surrounding their legacy applications.

• Mainframe Brain Drain – Staff with key knowledge are retiring and recruiting new staff is becoming difficult creating an increasing operational risk.
• High Costs – Licensing and platform costs are increasing, and talent is getting more expensive to attract and retain.
• New Customer Requirements – Innovation is difficult on legacy platforms and new features have a long time to market.
• Lack of Agility – Lack of modern development tools result in long development cycles and complex release management.
• Integration Issues – Lack of open standards makes integration with the mainframe difficult and time consuming.
  

The Benefits of Application Modernization and Migration

Legacy systems have been running businesses for decades and contain significant value in terms of fine-tuned processes and intellectual property. Modernization is a chance to revitalize this value and to prepare for the future:

• Address the skills gap and operational risks
  Modernizing applications to a platform based on modern standard technologies allows you to scale the development and maintenance teams with readily available skills.
• Increase Agility
  Decomposing your applications using state-of-the-art analysis tools allows us to transform your application maintenance to modern Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery practices and lets you take full advantage of DevOps, modern frameworks, and innovative cloud services to accelerate your innovation cycles.
• Realize Savings
  Moving workloads from the high-cost mainframe platform to scalable on-premise or cloud infrastructures, can drastically lower your IT spend and transforms high fixed costs to low variable costs that scale with demand.

Modernization and cloud migration have always been at the top of the CIO’s agenda but determining the right way forward has been a challenge. Our tried and tested approach is based on best-in-class tools, a proven methodology, and a global delivery model that will transform your exiting IT into the target state you desire, regardless of whether it is cloud-native or data center, and regardless of the technology stack your existing applications are based on.

With our approach, you define the target—be it on-premise or in the cloud—and we take care of the rest.
 

Legacy application modernization powered by Deloitte innoWake

We use our own Deloitte innoWake tools to transform your legacy applications into a modern technology stack using low-risk, fully automated code transformation. Deloitte innoWake consists of many different tools that can be used to accelerate your modernization journey at every stage.

• innoWake Discovery - Start your journey with a discovery assessment of your legacy systems.
  Our Application Discovery solution gathers information that includes current technologies, lines of business, programming languages, database-management systems, interfaces, and third-party software. Using these findings, our tool creates a visual diagram of the mainframe environment, including code dependencies and complexity. The assessment helps rationalize the application portfolio and architecture in ways that can help you plan the general direction of future-state technology transformation.
• innoWake Transformation - Fully automated migration of legacy code with our Transformation service.
  Transformation helps streamline the modernization process. It employs fully automated migration software to convert legacy code such as COBOL, Natural, PL/I, and Gen to Java and .NET. The software then migrates the code to a modern open-systems environment. This process, known as refactoring, can help you update legacy applications without altering functionality. From here, you can take the first step toward adopting the cloud and other technologies that are essential to a modern, integrated IT ecosystem.
• innoWake Modernization - Operational efficiencies and a fast track to the cloud with our Modernization service.
  Modernization helps you integrate modern platforms and technologies after legacy code has been migrated off the mainframe. Our solution offers a low-risk approach to help re-architect legacy applications to Cloud Native, an approach to building and running applications that enables developers to more rapidly deliver business-critical tools and services.
• innoWake Mining - Begin your modernization journey with our Mining service.
  Our Application Modernization Mining uses advanced analysis and code-abstraction tools to deliver deep understanding of how an application executes business processes through code. The solution first identifies relevant modules and code areas that contain business rules. Using business rules externalization, Mining extracts identified functional logic from the codebase to expose business knowledge that has been modified over the years, often without documentation.

How Deloitte Stands Apart

• Single-source partner: Our subject matter experts bring integrated capabilities to help you define a strategy, maximize potential technical and operational benefits, secure your cyber security, build a workforce of the future, navigate the regulatory and tax implications, and even operate the cloud. We migrate and modernize using our own tools and solutions, making us completely independent of third-party providers.
• Support for modern and legacy technologies: We can migrate your entire datacenter, including mainframe, mid-range, and distributed platforms.
• Low-risk transformation: Our 100% automated approach to the transformation of legacy code dramatically lowers risks for our clients and speeds up the migration away from legacy platforms.  
• A market-leading Application Modernization practice: With well over 1,000 practitioners focused on Application Modernization, our practice scales for global delivery and has a successful track record of over 20 years without a single failed project. Our continuous focus on innovation and investment into our own toolset keeps our capabilities ahead of the market. 
• Services enabled by automation: Our hybrid approach to delivery, enabled by innoWake™, enhances efficiency and minimizes business disruption. Our advanced data migration and modernization tools provide maximum efficiency and dramatically lower migration risks. They are unique to Deloitte and patent protected. 
• Technical scope and scale: We have an outstanding reputation and class-leading resources to modernization and migration. We offer thousands of professionals, global resources for migration and development, the ability to test solutions in our digital and cloud studios, and perennial leadership accolades, which together create client confidence in our ability to make their transformations happen. 
• Cyber Risk mitigation: Our cyber experts offer efficient and comprehensive cloud migration support, including prioritizing security, which serves as the foundation for maintaining data integrity, minimizing system errors, and preventing the loss of proprietary information. Our focus pillars include cyber strategy, identity management, data protection, infrastructure, and application security.
   

Discover more what our clients and experts are saying

We have successfully delivered a broad range of application modernization and migration projects. Read more about some of our selected case studies and our published articles. If you would like to learn more, we are pleased to have the opportunity to talk to you.

• How Deloitte helped GRAWE Group transform its core applications for the future
  GRAWE Group migrated the heart of its business, the central insurance application, from a mainframe platform to a Java environment. With the help of the team from Deloitte’s Center of Excellence for Application Modernization, the Austrian insurance company cut its costs by over 60%, while also enhancing the quality and flexibility of its operations.
  Read more here.
• Deloitte transforms a 25-year-old mainframe system with AWS
  Using our Application Modernization solution, we transformed the COBOL-based mainframe application to a Java-based system in an automated fashion and deployed it on AWS, using Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling services to create a highly available, secure, and elastic solution by automatically distributing incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
  Read more here.