Digital transformation has made it vital for businesses to modernize legacy systems. In the digital ecosystem, many leading organizations still work with legacy systems to host applications. However, running legacy systems offers a set of challenges and issues related to security, compatibility, and maintenance. These factors impact the efficiency of enterprises at large.
Therefore, restructuring legacy applications using agile strategies is the need of the hour. By partnering with an experienced legacy software modernization service provider, enterprises can take advantage of modern technologies, reduce data silos, and errors, and make data available to everyone, while ensuring better performance and productivity.
What is Legacy Modernization?
Legacy modernization or legacy system modernization is the process of remodeling the legacy system’s internal architecture and integrating flexible features. By modernizing the traditional IT infrastructure into a new environment, organizations can reduce IT complexity, enhance efficiency, enable a data-driven culture, and improve scalability across organizational processes.
Common Challenges Associated With Legacy Systems
Compatibility
Legacy systems are incompatible with new systems or technologies that are important for maintaining a competitive edge. Accordingly, departments using legacy systems may not experience all the functionalities offered by modern systems.
Lack of Integration
Software applications or workloads running on legacy systems remain detached from the other software, thereby lesser possibilities of integration for enterprises.
Employee Retention
It is hard for organizations to hire experts who control legacy systems. Hence, maintaining legacy systems without sufficient supervision impacts the performance of business-critical applications.
Maintenance Costs
Maintaining a legacy system in place means investing money in an IT resource that needs to be modernized anytime sooner or later.
Security
The lack of support, maintenance, or, updates, as well as the point of using traditional security protocols and standards, leads to the creation of patches that can lead to security breaches. This makes fulfilling regulatory compliance more difficult for organizations.
Reduced Productivity
Legacy systems are usually slower over time, which means performance, and efficiency can be greatly affected.
Advantages of Legacy Systems Modernization
Cost Reduction
It has been assessed that organizations spend around 65% of their IT expenditures on maintaining legacy systems. The huge amount of this maintenance process includes raising the support tickets and organizing the complex codes. Moreover, solving code errors in legacy systems may take from hours to several days and it demands organizations to hire skilled experts with profound knowledge of legacy systems. This ultimately results in higher operational and maintenance expenses.
Whereas, migrating to advanced cloud platforms allow organizations to re-model the legacy code using open-source programming technologies. In-house developers can overcome the practice of writing manual codes and reduce errors. Enterprises that modernize legacy systems using cloud platforms are more likely to gain a significant reduction in operational costs. By migrating workloads from legacy systems to cloud platforms, businesses can reduce the cost associated with data center utilities. Overall, enterprises can deliver more scalable and manageable services at feasible rates using a cloud platform.
Real-Time Data Accessibility
Data is the key for organizations to survive in today’s fast-paced and competitive market. Moving from an obsolete, legacy system to a modern environment allows the workforce to access a large volume of business information in real time. Immediate data backup is another benefit of legacy system modernization. When business workloads and applications run on the cloud, the enterprise’s data will be stored on the cloud, ensuring instant backup in case of any unforeseen downtimes.
Eliminates Manual Intervention and Improves User Experience
As legacy modernization comes together with automation, it will considerably reduce the number of resources required to organize and monitor application functioning and performance. It further alleviates manual errors and imprecisions associated with legacy operations. By hiring the right legacy application modernization services provider, business departments can leverage modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) to enhance their user experience. For example, revamping mobile/ web applications using AI-powered Chatbots can enhance user interaction and provide an intuitive experience.
Compliance Maintenance
In the dynamic ecosystem, fulfilling compliance is quintessential for every enterprise. With the evolving regulatory modifications, it is quite hard for legacy system-operating organizations to meet the ever-varying compliances.
For instance, consider a supply chain management enterprise that uses legacy systems and delivers services across the globe. Certainly, the company fails to fulfill diverse regulatory compliances of several countries and non-compliance results in huge financial losses. Hence, modernizing supply chain management strategies using advanced technologies like Big Data, Cloud, IoT, and AI can help the organization to maintain better compliance and eliminate hindrances to productivity.
Produce New Revenue Stream
Developing revenue is the ultimate goal of any enterprise. Whereas, using legacy applications or systems, enterprises will be confined within a particular geographic location and cannot experience different means of revenue generation. Innovation and growth are entwined in modern technologies. Therefore, by teaming up with the right legacy software modernization service provider, enterprises can adopt agile business models, which help them build more revenue than operating on traditional systems.
Wrapping Up
Overall, the decade-old legacy systems are not going to provide any value to businesses in the upcoming times. Executing legacy modernization can help organizations to improve growth and discover many new opportunities. But, before modernizing the present IT systems, businesses need to define & document their needs and business objectives. Specialists from the right technology company can help understand business requirements, prioritize investment, and appropriately digitize operations.
Devansh Bansal, Vice President – Presales, with a stint of over 23 years has steered fast growth and has played a key role in evolving Damco’s technology business to respond to the changes across multiple industry sectors. He is responsible for thoroughly understanding complex end-to-end customer solutions and make recommendations, estimations, and proposals. He has a proven track record of creating differentiated business-driven solutions to help our clients gain a competitive advantage. Being a go-getter and hands-on leader, Devansh’s contribution to the growth and success of Damco is immeasurable.
