September 10, 2025

How to Decide on a Modernization Strategy For Your Enterprise App

The choice of an effective app modernization strategy is crucial for driving a digital product evolution and addressing issues such as poor performance, a negative user experience, or outdated infrastructure. Modernizing around 2-4 enterprise apps or complex legacy solutions annually, Artkai has gained diverse experience in implementing modernization strategies that reduce risks, enhance UX, and maximize ROI.

In this article, we aim to transform this experience into a practical guide that walks you through five key modernization strategies we’ve implemented in practice. It highlights the technical aspects and processes each strategy involves to modernize enterprise apps, as well as shows how they impact business value, making it handy for CTOs, CIOs, and tech leads to make informed choices about modernization.

5 Modernization Strategies for Enterprise Applications

Effective legacy software modernization is typically built on striking a balance between the actual needs of change and how they align with specific business goals and user expectations. We have tested this in practice through multiple enterprise application modernization projects in various domains, including fintech, healthcare, martech, education, and many more.

That’s why the Artkai team always grounds the choice of modernization strategy on diving deep into the client’s business objectives behind the digital product and the technical audit that helps to clarify the issues influencing app performance. Based on this, we offer our clients a strategy that is the best fit for increasing their particular business value, as demonstrated in our modernization cases for a healthcare communication platform and a mobile banking application.

Let’s take a closer look at different software modernization strategies and determine when each is the best choice.

Approach	How it works	What it includes	Business value
Encapsulation	- Adding new features to microservices or new modules. - Creating interaction standards through contractual interfaces. - An intermediate abstraction layer (proxy or API gateway) is added.	- Designing adapters or APIs. - Integration and testing of new components. - Analysis of current system capabilities.	- Possibility of parallel development of new services. - Faster access to new mobile channels or partner platforms. - Reduced dependence on internal logic. - Modernized systems leverage the existing business logic of the legacy application.
Rehosting	- Adapting to a new environment, such as a storage system or network. - Automation of CI/CD processes. - Migration of containers or virtual machines.	- Audit the current environment and identify issues and dependencies. - Selecting the type of deployment as IaaS, PaaS, and cloud provider. - Migration with minimal downtime.	- Minimization of risks. - Reduced infrastructure costs. - Better availability and scalability. Acceleration of timelines.
Refactoring	- Removing duplication and optimizing database queries. - Improved logging and caching. - Code restructuring.	- Analysis of the level of technical debt. - Code review and test coverage. - Integration of CI/CD changes.	- Minimization of system bugs. - Faster development productivity. - Increased work stability.
Architecture Modernization	- Building service interaction through message brokers or APIs. - Decomposition of the monolith. - Using managed cloud services such as Kubernetes, Serverless, and DBaaS.	- Implementation of new services. - Developing an architectural map. - Application of DevOps practices.	- Resistance to failures. - Flexibility to scale without stopping the system. - Increased agility, manageability, and performance. - Enhanced UX and tech stack that increase legacy software competitiveness .
UX Audit and Product Redesign	- Heuristic evaluation and user testing. - User journey and persona mapping. - Creating a user-friendly, scalable design system.	- Accessibility testing and enhancement. - Conversion rate optimization. - Development-friendly design that increases the efficiency of the implementation process.	- Increased user engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. - Correspondence of interface design to modern tech stack. - Readiness for scaling design at the next stages of product evolution.

Encapsulation

This app modernization approach involves creating new interfaces or an API layer around legacy systems. It is a structured process of encasing legacy product components into a reconsidered architecture without a complete recoding, but creating a new interface that allows the modernized application to interact effectively with the logic of the old system.

Encapsulation sets the path for the efficient expansion of a legacy application with new features or modules and involves the addition of an intermediate layer of abstraction. It presents a phased approach to modernizing enterprise applications that allows businesses to avoid the risks and costs associated with a complete system rewrite. It is a way to activate limited modernization benefits by improving accessibility and user experience around the core logic of the already existing product, as well as integrating with up-to-date applications. Encapsulation is also the way to facilitate a gradual transition to a microservices architecture without total recoding.

This strategy of the modernization process allows developers to work on new services in parallel, thereby speeding up updates and enabling easier maintenance. Additionally, it enables the development team to preserve the data and provides app users with faster access to partner platforms or new mobile channels.

Rehosting

Rehosting involves transferring a system to a new infrastructure and utilizing cloud solutions without code changes. The legacy application or its workload is moved from its current environment to a cloud-based infrastructure with minimal or no changes to the application itself. As a result, the business can rapidly leverage cloud benefits, such as scalability, resilience, and potential cost reductions.

This strategy is a good choice as an early step in cloud adoption, enabling stakeholders and developers to try and test the benefits of cloud technology before making more complex decisions about modernizing complex legacy systems. Rehosting allows for migrating the enterprise software with saving its functionality and without changes in its architecture. The approach focuses on speed and simplicity, offering cost-effectiveness and ease of implementation over complex strategies, such as rearchitecting. This can be a crucial benefit for achieving specific business goals, such as launching new functionality, improving performance, or reducing operational costs.

Refactoring

Refactoring is an effective enterprise application modernization strategy for systems with high technical debt, frequent production failures, and poor system performance. The method is based on restructuring the software source code to achieve a better internal design and maintainability, without altering the legacy system's functionality or external behavior.

The approach focuses on arranging and cleaning up messy or poorly structured code to make it more understandable and flexible for future modifications and extensions. Therefore, the strategy lays the solid foundation for faster development, predictability, and stability of work, and helps to minimize system bugs.

One of the major benefits of refactoring is that it does not alter the legacy system’s functionality from the user’s perspective, so it doesn’t significantly impact the customer experience and doesn’t require users to relearn the system. What it does impact positively is product performance and the stability of the enterprise software work. Through a set of thoroughly planned and controlled changes, the modernized software achieves clean, better-manageable code with enhanced structure, making it easier for developers to understand, update, and modify in the future, thereby reducing time and costs.

Product architecture modernization

This strategy is a perfect fit when the technology foundation of the enterprise application fails to meet the changing needs and expectations of users or doesn't align with actual regulations and standards. It involves reconsidering the product's technical and logical basis and updating it at the architecture level. Consequently, the product becomes more failure-proof and opens more opportunities to be scaled without stopping the system.

Unlike the previous enterprise app modernization strategies described above, rearchitecting is a comprehensive realignment and reconsideration of the legacy product’s architecture. It often involves decisions on core changes that would increase agility and improve product performance, for instance, utilizing serverless models or breaking a monolithic system into microservices.

A fundamental change in the enterprise app architecture is also a key strategy that enables developers to modernize the tech stack and replace outdated or unsupported technology used in the legacy product with modern, better-performing solutions, taking advantage of the best enterprise app modernization trends.

UX audit and product redesign

This strategy delves into the core of user experience to define and address the issues that prevent the existing application from meeting current user expectations. The need for redesign is typically determined by the users' needs and market transformations that require some steps to enhance the appeal, accessibility, and relevance of the legacy enterprise software. The decision regarding the redesign can be grounded in user feedback and an analysis of the competition, as well as the company's specific business goals.

One of the crucial stages of this strategy is the UX audit, a process that identifies aspects slowing down conversion growth, pain points leading to a poor customer experience, or user annoyances that cause them to leave the application.

This approach enables the business to establish a clear roadmap for redesigning legacy systems and fixing the issues, which leads to product evolution that enhances user satisfaction, engagement, and retention. With a wisely accomplished redesign of its enterprise application, a business not only improves its product’s functionality and UX but also increases its chances of staying highly competitive, boosting sales, reaching new markets or audiences, or aligning the product with new strategic business directions.

Strategy	Cost	Speed	Risk	When to use
Encapsulation	Low	Fast	Low	Quick fixes, API exposure
Rehosting	Low	Fast	Low	Cloud migration needs
Replatforming	Medium	Medium	Medium	Modern infrastructure needed
Refactoring	Medium-high	Medium	Medium	Tech debt reduction
UX/UI modernization	Low-medium	Fast	Low	User complaints or poor UX

Case Study: Strategic Modernization for Healthcare Communication Platform

Let’s examine how strategic enterprise app modernization enhances product evolution and influences the client’s business through a practical case study of a healthcare communication platform.

This case required a combination of legacy system modernization strategies, so we used an efficient mix of encapsulation, refactoring, and UI/UX modernization.

Client and Project

In this project, Artkai provided complex legacy software modernization for a major client based in the USA. The company offers services in healthcare and healthtech and is a recognized global leader in critical communication solutions for healthcare, generating around $140 million in annual revenues.

The healthcare communication platform aims to efficiently organize and expedite communication, delivering clinical information to healthcare teams when and where it matters most. It is an ecosystem of digital products that improves patient outcomes, supports public safety, and ultimately saves lives. The products are used by over 2,200 hospitals and clinics serving adults and children, with approximately 70 million messages sent by their users each month.

The stakeholders approached the Artkai team, seeking comprehensive modernization of their legacy enterprise applications and infrastructure.

Challenge

Over the years, the platform's products underwent multiple iterations of changes and additions. This resulted in a poor user experience and performance issues because of an outdated tech stack. Another essential problem was that releasing new features was complicated and time-consuming, and that created difficulty for stakeholders in keeping the app up to date for users.

Therefore, the client set the Artkai team a goal of not only improving the existing solution but also transforming it into an up-to-date, convenient multifunctional product that would enable healthcare staff to communicate even more quickly and easily through a variety of intuitive solutions for personal and group chats.

Unstructured requirements, the absence of a holistic product architecture, and an outdated stack of the legacy application had to be transformed into a new digital product ecosystem that provides new practical and flexible functionality, effectively combined with the old chat.

Enterprise App Modernization Steps

After conducting in-depth product discovery and gaining a comprehensive understanding of the client’s business goals and modernization priorities, the Artkai team built an efficient enterprise app modernization strategy for this case, which included the following stages.

UI/UX audit and redesign: up-to-date user experience was thoroughly analyzed and transformed into one consistent user-friendly system
Mobile, web, and back-end development: the legacy enterprise software was transitioned to a modern, scalable tech stack and new functionality with high performance
SDLC automation: seamless integration of automated solutions at the software development lifecycle significantly reduced manual effort and increased efficiency
QA automation: automated testing solutions enabled us to speed up and shorten testing regression from 2 months to 2 weeks
Delivery transparency: the stakeholders reached clarity of the processes at all levels, enhanced reporting, and could effectively arrange the following steps

Approach and Solutions

The first important point to mention is that the strategic shift-left approach we built provided the client with confidence and transparency in planning and arranging the subsequent stages while the team worked on the current stage. The product architecture of the modernized software was solid and carefully thought out. The refreshed UI/UX design became systematic, consistent, and development-friendly, and the documentation was accomplished properly. With all that, we could guarantee the accuracy of estimations and provide clarity and predictability of the following steps to the client. Thus, with Artkai, the stakeholders could plan product improvements and business development based on realistic prospects and timeframes.

Another beneficial aspect was the integration of automated solutions into the software development lifecycle, which reliably accelerated the delivery of new features and product updates. Due to the solid architecture and automation we provided, regression testing was reduced significantly, from a matter of months to a matter of weeks, leading to faster production releases. So, the client could take advantage of enhancing the quality of the product and boosting its performance and sales much more quickly.

So, through this enterprise app modernization case, the major aspects that influenced reaching the client’s business goals included:

Transparent delivery and well-documented requirements: The сlient gained a solid turnkey solution. Artkai took full responsibility for managing the process and setting tasks for the modernization of enterprise apps, ensuring they were perfectly aligned with the client’s vision of the ecosystem evolution.
User-friendly, intuitive interface: The redesign of the legacy application, based on careful research into how it was used and what problems it solved, led to enhanced, well-tested usability and accessibility of critical functionality. As a result, a significant positive impact on the efficiency of medical staff work was observed.
Up-to-date, scalable technical solutions: The legacy enterprise application was transformed into an accessible, secure, and future-proof modern communication software that stakeholders can scale and enhance in a flexible manner according to actual user needs.
SDLC and QA automation: Automation solutions significantly accelerated the development process, which led to faster delivery and reduced manual effort.

Outcomes and Benefits

Collaboration with Artkai on the legacy products modernization led the client to tangible business outcomes and further prospects, for example:

Revenue growth showed a 30% rise in sales for Q1-Q2 2025, even at the presale stage, compared to legacy products.
Adoption rate within hospital networks increased significantly: according to the client’s observations, 95% of healthcare professionals use the platform actively.
Communication delays are reduced by up to 40% compared to the previous outdated legacy software, resulting in quicker responses. In the healthcare sector, this aspect is critical and can be literally life-saving.
Modern, user-friendly design and development solutions substantially increased usability, learnability, compliance, and security of personal data of the healthcare communication platform.
Modern, secure, and future-proof tech stack ensures efficiency and speed of further platform development.

The long-term collaboration on enterprise software modernization has transformed Artkai into a strategic partner for the client’s business. With a deep expertise in the domain and understanding of the company's business goals, we integrated into their business success journey, reliably supporting their approach to technological innovations in modern healthcare communication.

Bottom Line

Enterprise app modernization extends far beyond the mere integration of cutting-edge technologies. It primarily focuses on selecting the right strategy that helps businesses achieve their goals and enhance the customer experience.

Artkai's experience demonstrates that a strategically approached and well-executed application modernization for enterprise software leads to tangible business outcomes, while also laying the foundation for future product growth and evolution, as illustrated in the case study above.If you are at the point of transforming your legacy software to boost your business and make your digital product users happier, let’s discuss it together. Contact us, and we will help you choose and implement an app modernization strategy that perfectly fits your business goals.