From Legacy Apps To Emerging Tech: 20 Business Modernization Tips

Legacy applications that once may have been essential to enterprise operations are now a growing source of friction. As systems age, they often limit scalability, slow down innovation, and create barriers to adopting newer, more efficient technologies—ultimately affecting performance and strategic agility.

For organizations aiming to stay competitive, legacy app modernization has become a business-critical priority. Below, 20 members of Forbes Technology Council explore the risks of holding onto outdated systems, the broader operational impact and practical strategies for evolving toward a more flexible, future-ready technology foundation.

1. Build An Abstraction Layer With Event-Driven Architecture

Legacy apps trap data in monoliths and lack APIs for composability. This blocks AI, automation and real-time insights. The fix isn’t a full rewrite—it’s building an abstraction layer with event-driven architecture. Decouple the core, stream the signals and let innovation run in parallel. – Dr. Almira Kolaneci, Circana

2. Plan Carefully To Introduce Minimal Disruption

Early-days enterprise Java apps remain essential to business operations, supporting many newer apps. While functional, these legacy solutions often struggle to meet modern performance, security and scalability needs, hindering digital growth. The issue isn’t whether to modernize but how to do so with minimal disruption. Thoughtful planning can help older apps meet today’s demands and stay relevant. – Steve Millidge, Payara Services Ltd

3. Modernize Legacy Apps With Cloud-Native Architectures

Legacy apps, often not built for cloud-native environments, require significant modifications to support emerging technologies like GenAI and agentic AI. Their limitations in scalability and resiliency hinder innovation. To address this, leaders should prioritize modernizing these applications with cloud-native architectures or strategically phase them out before integrating emerging technologies. – Amey Banarse, Yugabyte Inc

4. Implement A Phased Integration Strategy

Legacy applications lack encryption and multifactor authentication, making them vulnerable to attackers. They are often not designed to integrate with newer technologies, creating data and process silos. To ensure a smooth transition, adopt a phased integration strategy to minimize risks and disruptions. Then, ETL tools can convert legacy data into AI-friendly formats, maintaining past investments. – Arpna Aggarwal, Labcorp

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

5. Focus On Maintenance While Integrating Emerging Tech

Legacy apps often rely on outdated architectures that aren’t compatible with modern cloud, AI or automation technologies, limiting innovation and agility. The best solution is a strategic maintenance approach that optimizes existing systems while integrating emerging technologies—avoiding costly rip-and-replace models and ensuring business continuity. – Tomás O’Leary, Origina

6. Embrace A Critical Thinking Approach And Innovation

Legacy apps can hinder businesses by creating inefficiencies and delaying the integration of emerging technologies. A critical thinking approach can help augment and run alongside key legacy pathways. Businesses should encourage new ideas and technologies to proactively drive innovation so that they can deliver functional yet transformative outcomes and remain competitive in the market. – Mo Trezies, Euna Solutions

7. Make Incremental Changes To Overcome Resistance

User resistance to change and the rigid monolithic architecture of legacy apps are key reasons for issues with bringing on emerging technologies. Implementing a strategic approach to migrate incrementally, rather than replacing all at once, and sharing success stories through awareness campaigns will be the best solution to this issue. – Manikandarajan Shanmugavel, S&P Global

8. Use ETL Services For Legacy Data Migration

Migration of existing customer data is one of the key challenges organizations face when deciding to move from legacy systems to newer technology. Legacy systems often lock data in silos. The best solution is to define a phased and seamless data migration strategy using ETL services offered by cloud providers, such as AWS Glue and Amazon Kinesis. – Apeksha Jain

9. Migrate Legacy Data To The Cloud

Legacy applications, often siloed and lacking APIs, hinder access to critical data, preventing businesses from leveraging AI and other emerging technologies. The best solution is effective data management—migrating legacy data to the cloud for accessibility, reconciliation and accuracy. This ensures a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making and innovation. – Natalia Kuklova, Webster Bank

10. Break Free From ‘Frankenstacks’ With Unified Tech

Plug-and-play functionality is a priority for new tech—but why? The issue isn’t any one legacy system; it’s the “frankenstack” of layered, disconnected solutions. To break free from mounting tech debt caused by this, IT leaders must focus on technology that centralizes data and enhances visibility across their stack, ensuring a more cohesive and efficient infrastructure. – Paul Deraval, NinjaCat

11. Start By Updating The Most Critical Parts

Legacy apps often slow innovation because they’re hard to update and connect with newer technologies. This makes it tough to adopt things like cloud, AI or automation. A practical solution is to modernize in phases, starting with the most critical parts, so the business gains new capabilities without major disruption. – Joseph Olorunyomi, Accomplishr

12. Adopt Modular Modernization

Legacy apps lack scalability and integration capabilities, making it difficult to adopt AI, blockchain or cloud-based technologies. Their rigid architecture slows innovation and increases maintenance costs. The best solution is modular modernization—using APIs, microservices and cloud migration to incrementally update systems without making full replacements, ensuring seamless tech adoption. – Bob Ras, CoreNest

13. Bridge The Gap With AI-Driven Transition Layers

Legacy apps trap businesses in outdated decision-making loops, forcing them to optimize for past realities instead of future opportunities. AI-driven transition layers offer a bridge, not a compromise, reducing disruption while gradually shifting control to AI-native platforms, where agility, automation and intelligence are inherent, not layered on after the fact. – Roi Sorezki, twik

14. Gradually Upgrade Or Replace Systems

These outdated systems can be slow, expensive to maintain and difficult to integrate with modern solutions like cloud computing or AI. The best way to fix this is by gradually upgrading or replacing old systems with flexible, modern platforms that can easily connect with new technologies while keeping essential business functions running smoothly. – Naresh Kumar Miryala, Meta

15. Replace High-Maintenance Tech To Escape Emergency Mode

Legacy technology keeps your organization in emergency mode at all times. Constant security patches and high-maintenance efforts demanded by legacy apps consume resources meant for innovation and forward-looking plans. This reactionary strategy keeps companies mired in the past, unable to leverage real-time analytics, artificial intelligence and automation. – Arturo Garcia, DNAMIC | Databricks Data Solutions

16. Build API Layers To Liberate Data

Legacy apps don’t just slow you down—they’re data prisons holding your most valuable business information hostage. While everyone obsesses over shiny AI tools, your critical intelligence remains trapped in systems designed when “cloud” meant rain. The solution isn’t a risky rewrite—it’s building API layers that liberate your data while old systems keep running. Modernize gradually. – Nishant Modak, Last9

17. Introduce New Tools Into Existing Workflows

Legacy apps can trap people in routines. If you’ve spent years perfecting a process, even if it’s clunky, you are reluctant to change. So don’t make everyone learn something entirely new. Introduce tools into existing workflows. Start with clear, everyday tasks that deliver immediate, tangible results. This won’t upend entire processes and allows you to integrate new tech gradually. – Hunter Steele, Smokeball

18. Implement Identity Abstraction

Legacy apps often rely on outdated identity and access control methods, making it difficult to integrate with modern cloud platforms and advanced security tools. To overcome this, businesses should implement an abstraction layer that bridges legacy and modern identity systems, enabling seamless interoperability and secure access across all environments. – Eric Olden, Strata Identity

19. Replace Legacy Systems With Open Platforms

Today, data is the most valuable asset of any business. Legacy apps prevent the flow of data across multiple essential systems that are required to operate a business efficiently. Even though it’s a difficult choice to make, the sooner legacy apps are replaced, the faster the company grows. Adopt open platforms that embrace free and open API access to your data while staying away from closed systems. – Hamed Mazrouei, Milagro

20. Conduct A Complete Software Audit

Maintaining legacy apps demands specialized expertise, which diverts budget and staff resources from modern technology investments. A strategic solution involves a software audit. This audit should determine whether refactoring or a complete overhaul is necessary, outline a smooth transition and establish modern development workflows that prioritize both maintenance and future innovation. – Konstantin Klyagin, Redwerk