# Phases of the modernization process
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 Modernizing your applications to meet customer demands and to take advantage of the changing technology landscape is critical to maintaining your organization’s competitive advantage and market share. A key strategy to meeting these business demands is to deliver both continued use and real value by converting aging applications to more modern architectures. Having a comprehensive understanding of the application’s details and its interrelationships with other systems is a critical step in performing application modernization.

The AWS approach to application modernization is iterative, and can be divided into three high-level phases—assess, modernize, and manage—as illustrated in the following diagram. 

 ![Phases of the application modernization process](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/strategy-modernizing-applications/images/modernization-phases.png) 

The following sections discuss each phase in detail.

**Topics**
+ [Assess](assess.md)
+ [Modernize](modernize.md)
+ [Manage](manage.md)