Legacy Application Modernization in the Financial Services Sector
Project Description
Mantrax was engaged to modernize mission-critical applications and infrastructure for a business management company in the financial services industry.
The client had a monolithic application built using a PHP framework that was abandoned years ago. It was not maintained by anyone and the developer who built this system had abandoned them to seek a full-time opportunity elsewhere.
To make things worse, they were running off a decades old database technology that was not supported and was very poorly designed.
The Problem
Business Stability
With such legacy systems, there is a lot of resistance to change. It was natural for our client to feel anxious about making drastic changes to existing systems. There was a fear of a scenario where the legacy application modernization won’t go smoothly and their business processes would come to a screeching halt.
Technical
These types of applications could abruptly stop working if any of the system administrators updated the operating system or even applied a patch without understanding the consequences. Even worse, this software system did not receive any security updates for years and was vulnerable to various cyber-attacks.
The Solution
One ideal approach would have been to go through a complete redesign of the application including re-architecting the database. However, given the tremendous amount of stress our client was enduring, and budget considerations, we took the “good solution today” approach.
- Decide on the new technology stack which was best suited for their business
- Create a list of all database objects (tables, stored procedures, user-defined functions) which needed to be migrated
- Have a senior developer work on this project – one who knew the PHP framework as well as the new framework chosen for this application (Angular / Express JS)