Custom Application Development Explained—And Its Role in Digital Transformation

You’ve heard of Custom Application Development (CAD), but do you really know what the service entails?

At a high level, its name implies its purpose—developing custom applications for organizations whose IT needs aren’t met by off-the-shelf solutions. But that definition is just a small piece of a much larger story. In fact, when it comes to digital transformation journeys, CAD services play a vital role.

To help you understand the role CAD can play in your digital transformation journey, we break down some of the common application challenges it solves—and how it can accelerate your business’ modernization in the cloud.

How Your Legacy Application Pain Points Are Stalling Digital Transformation

Shine a spotlight on any enterprise that has been around for more than a decade, and you’ll likely find an IT environment rife with homegrown or highly customized applications. In fact, according to a report from McAfee and the Cloud Security Alliance, the average enterprise has nearly 500 custom applications deployed.

Many of these custom applications—like proprietary content management, e-commerce and reporting systems and more—are tied to core revenue-generating processes and are crucial to how companies run their businesses and engage with customers. But here’s the catch: Over time, the net value of these custom applications can be diminished due to several factors:

• Technical debt – Over the years, custom applications accrue tremendous technical debt. According to Gartner, the average Fortune 2000 company has an average IT debt of more than $200 million—adding up to $500 billion of technical debt worldwide, even on a conservative estimate.

• Skills shortage – When the people who create or manage these legacy applications leave the company, IT loses the critical knowledge required to manage the application estate. That’s a problem when you consider many custom applications were built on older technologies that aren’t being used by new coders.

• Application management burden – Applications need to be managed, maintained and kept up-to-date with upgrades, regulation changes and new security processes. This places a heavy burden on internal teams to manage and keep these applications up and running—taking time away from other, higher value projects they could be working on to drive innovation and support the business.

• Application risk – The combination of technical debt and lack of in-house expertise creates a recipe for disaster that escalates the risk associated with these legacy custom applications.

All of these factors create a significant dilemma for IT departments: They realize that running legacy applications on-premises is no longer benefiting the business. Instead, it’s actually increasing their costs and risks. The alternative is modernizing and moving to the cloud. However, many IT teams believe that the combination of technical debt and lack of in-house expertise makes it difficult—or even impossible—to move a modernization project forward.  

That’s why to successfully migrate their complex applications, more and more businesses are leveraging CAD services to make it happen.

How CAD Services Can Help Businesses Get to the Cloud

You want to move to the cloud, but you don’t have the in-house expertise to do so—and finding qualified experts is no easy task. Not only is it challenging to recruit and retain the specialized experts you need, but certain skills are only needed some of the time. You need an easy and cost-effective approach to acquiring the required skills and expertise. Partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) such as Navisite helps you meet both objectives.

Our CAD team is comprised of highly skilled experts in both legacy infrastructure and cloud environments, which makes Navisite uniquely suited to help you overcome the traditional challenges associated with migrating your custom applications to the cloud. And with our flexible engagement model, you’ll benefit from a more cost-efficient, predictable and scalable approach to bringing in the experts with the skills and knowledge you need, when you need them. 

Our CAD services fall into three categories:

1. Legacy application modernization – We’ll bring legacy applications to life in your new IT environment by either rewriting them for a modern technology stack in the cloud, or building new custom cloud-native applications. 
2. Managing legacy applications – We can manage your legacy applications to mitigate the risks of ongoing maintenance with legacy skillsets, and then we’ll work with you to define a migration roadmap.
3. Application investigation and problem-solving – Because our CAD experts have deep functional knowledge in both legacy and cloud technologies, they can dig deep to solve almost any problem that arises in any environment—no matter how obscure.

Bridging the Old with the New

With Navisite, you can have the best of both worlds: highly customized applications running in modern cloud environments—without the technical debt, skills gap and risk associated with legacy infrastructure. By partnering with us, you can solve your most complex application challenges, secure and stabilize applications in the cloud to execute successful and on-budget digital transformation projects and create a more scalable, agile and cloud-ready business.

To learn more about our CAD services, go to: www.navisite.com/services/custom-application-development. To find out how we can help you modernize your business with custom application expertise that is second to none, contact us today.