Low-code platforms are a major boon to IT departments, with a new report by Microsoft saying they “help drive efficiency gains.”

Low-code development has been one of the fastest-growing segments of the development industry. In fact, research projects the low-code development market will be worth $94.75 billion by 2028.

According to Microsoft, low-code development is more than a gimmick or fad, providing tangible value to IT departments:

Low-code platforms help drive efficiency gains by accelerating legacy application modernization and expediting development efforts via prebuilt components. In fact, 89 percent of CIOs and IT pros surveyed say low-code is effective in increasing efficiency.

Low-code is especially helpful amid an economic downturn that has seen developers laid off, leaving companies short-staffed in their efforts to modernize legacy applications:

To close the app gap generated by developer shortages and traditional development timelines, low-code helps organizations reduce time to value by extending existing legacy core capabilities, streamlining migration projects, and replacing legacy applications with low-code solutions. These solutions are an incredible boost to application modernization endeavors, as 87 percent of CIOs and IT pros say low-code is very useful in helping their organizations modernize legacy applications.

Another benefit of low-code platforms is the role they play in breaking down silos. With a reduced barrier to entry, low-code platforms have enabled non-IT personnel to be involved in the development process, reducing the strain on IT departments.

Microsoft’s research agrees, finding that low-code platforms help improve company insights:

Low-code platforms help break down data siloes by centralizing that data and putting easy to consume data visualizations in users’ hands for cleaner, more actionable data.

Many low-code solutions are built to lift and shift legacy applications and automate manual time-consuming processes. These solutions help break down data siloes, reducing data duplication and centralizing data in a single source of truth. This centralized repository created by low-code platforms is why 86 percent of CIOs and IT pros say low-code helps their organizations generate more accurate insights from their data.

These more accurate insights enable IT pros to build more comprehensive and effective solutions for users. This means reduced re-work and greater adoption of solutions reducing costs and time to market, resulting in decreasing application backlogs for IT departments. The impact of these solutions is evident as 89 percent and 88 percent of CIOs and IT pros respectively say low-code has been effective in generating data-driven insights that they use to better service customers and internal stakeholders.

Low-code platforms are clearly here to stay and, in many ways, have benefited from the current economic situation. As IT and development teams continue to be stretched thin, low-code platforms will continue to grow.