- Brian Riera, Graduate Business and Technology Analyst
Many organisations today find themselves stuck midway through their cloud journey, eager to migrate more but held back by outdated, complex legacy applications. These systems often sit at the heart of daily operations, yet they are also the root cause of spiralling infrastructure costs, security risks, and limited agility. Typically monolithic and difficult to scale, they are tethered to outdated infrastructure, reliant on unsupported dependencies, and resistant to integration with modern DevOps tooling or cloud-native services. This creates bottlenecks in deployment and innovation. As a result, organisations often struggle to realise the full value of the cloud. The issue is not a lack of intent, but the weight of their legacy stack.
App modernisation offers a practical path forward. By assessing the application landscape and choosing the right modernisation approach, businesses can reduce operational overhead, accelerate migration, and lay the foundation for long-term innovation.
BoatyardX Approach: Assess First, Optimise Strategically
At BoatyardX, we start with an evaluation of your current application landscape. Through our DiscoverX process, we help uncover technical blockers, identify high-risk areas, and explore modernisation opportunities, all before committing to large-scale change.
From there, we recommend the most cost-effective path forward using the 7Rs framework. This lets us align business goals with the right level of transformation for each app, whether it’s a simple lift-and-shift or a full re-architecture. The result? Clear, prioritised actions that reduce complexity, unlock savings, and set the stage for scalable cloud adoption.
The 7Rs Framework: Choosing the Right Strategy
So, what exactly are the 7Rs and how do they help reduce cost through modernisation? Let’s break it down. Developed by AWS, the 7Rs framework is a practical tool we use to classify each application based on its business value, technical complexity, and modernisation potential. By mapping apps to one of the seven strategies, we help organisations make informed, cost-conscious decisions that avoid overengineering and accelerate time to value.
Each of the seven Rs represents a different approach to modernisation. Here is how they work in practice:
Retire: Remove redundant systems that no longer deliver value. Eliminating these frees up budget, reduces security risk, and simplifies your estate.
Retain: Some apps are better left as-is, either because they aren’t ready for migration or there’s no cost benefit. We recommend retaining only when it’s a deliberate, strategic choice.
Rehost: Also known as lift and shift, this strategy moves applications to the cloud without code changes. It’s fast and lower risk, ideal for legacy workloads that need quick wins.
Relocate: Similar to rehost, but done at the infrastructure platform level, like moving virtual machines from on-prem to IaaS. It’s often automated and doesn’t impact the app.
Repurchase: When a SaaS option offers better value, we replace the existing app. This shifts cost from maintenance to subscription, while gaining modern features instantly.
Replatform: Keep the app, but optimise its environment, for example, by moving to a managed database or container platform. This improves efficiency without rewriting code.
Refactor (or Rearchitect): The most transformative option, rebuilding the app to take full advantage of cloud-native services, like serverless, containers, and microservices. It’s high effort, but high reward.
By categorising each app, we help clients prioritise the changes that will deliver the most value, whether that’s speed, cost savings, or readiness for future development. The illustration below shows how each of the 7Rs corresponds to distinct technical steps, from early assessment through to deployment. This can help teams understand the scope and complexity of each migration route.
Source: AWS
How App Modernisation Drives Cost Optimisation
App modernisation is not just a technical upgrade, It’s a lever for broader business efficiency. By replatforming or refactoring legacy applications, organisations can optimise resource usage, reducing compute and storage costs. Retiring redundant systems and removing manual workarounds helps reduce technical debt and frees teams to focus on more valuable initiatives.
As part of this shift, adopting modern tooling and platforms improves developer productivity, enabling faster release cycles and reducing bottlenecks. Security and compliance improve as legacy vulnerabilities are addressed and systems are brought in line with modern standards. For many organisations, modernisation also opens the door to external support, such as Microsoft’s funded app modernisation assessments, which can help offset upfront investment.
These benefits go beyond infrastructure, creating measurable impact on cost, risk, and innovation readiness.
Conclusion: Modernisation as a Catalyst
More than a system upgrade, app modernisation represents a pivotal shift toward a more efficient and future-ready business. At BoatyardX, we help businesses move from uncertainty to clarity. Through our DiscoverX process, we deliver a structured, insight-led evaluation of your application landscape and align each system to the most cost-effective path using the AWS 7Rs model. Whether that means rehosting legacy .NET apps on Azure or refactoring workloads for containers, we provide both the strategic direction and technical expertise to deliver real results. If legacy systems are slowing your progress, modernisation could be the most efficient way to move forward.
Get in Contact
If you have a new concept or existing product and are considering taking the next steps, we would love to discuss if a BoatyardX Discovery project can help you achieve your product vision.
Reach out at letsgettowork@boatyardx.com
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