There is no one path to app modernization; your business priorities shape the modernization process. It is critical to assess your legacy application portfolio and how the new model aligns with business priorities. Some of the key challenges businesses can face while migrating from Silverlight are as follows:
Silverlight end-of-support deadline: Silverlight support is soon coming to an end. Organizations need to plan a seamless move to a modern framework within the next year or so. Waiting is not an option here especially as acquiring resources at the last moment can be expensive.
Defining an approach: Businesses can find it challenging to decide the most suitable approach. When deciding on the migration path, they need to take into consideration critical parameters like the complexity of the application, modernization objectives, and the availability of skills and resources.
Ensuring functionality and user experience: The interactive nature of a rich client app built using Silverlight is not readily available in modern frameworks. This poses another challenge for business and may require quite a bit of an engineering effort to bring the new application to work similar or better than the existing application.
Modernization time and cost: Developers may need additional time to modernize large and complex apps. This can prove to be costly for a business. Using pre-defined tools and accelerators can help speed up the process and reduce both modernization time and cost.
Building security measures: Systems and applications that incorporate sensitive business data have to deal with security and compliance issues. It is important to considering security as an important component in the modernization process.
Companies are undertaking a significant transformation by moving away from Silverlight or flash-based delivery mechanisms and replacing them with unified open-source HTML5/JavaScript-based frameworks, such as Angular/React. However, this type of migration requires a lot of planning and business risk evaluation. Challenges may vary from one app to the other, but without a way forward, you could be risking your business.
Nous has in-depth experience in defining strategies and deploying the right set of technologies to build and run successful app modernization programs. We have done over twenty Silverlight modernization programs over the past two years, making us one amongst a select few in the market today. We offer expert Silverlight migration services and have developed multiple proprietary tools/accelerators to help organizations to speed up the process and even provide a cost saving of 30-50% depending on complexity.