Will 2024 crush old legacy systems for good?

In the era of digitization and the digital economy, IT systems are changing at an astonishing pace to serve the ever-increasing demands of consumers. However, behind the user-friendly interfaces and modern customer experience, there are legacy software systems built in the past that have become indispensable today, but at the same time outdated and constantly increasing costs.

Today, IT managers and CIOs are faced with an important decision: should they maintain the increasingly costly legacy systems that pose IT security risks, or should they embark on software modernization? We show you how we here at United Consult see this topic!

Why is it still used at all?

The question may rightly arise: why, or more precisely, in what cases will organizations maintain outdated legacy applications in 2024, when the waves of the digital explosion will bring amazing innovations to the IT sector?

The answer is trivial: Legacy technology is still in use most of the time because, despite its obsolescence and many flaws, it is essential to maintain a business that has been established over many years or even decades, due to its stability and the huge amount of data stored historically. This is especially true for systems used in the financial sphere, healthcare and manufacturing industries.

Programming languages that are no longer supported by developers and applications no longer supported by the developer often pose security or stability risks. If the system does not perform a critical task, then sometimes these risks are acceptable to the IT manager. When modernizing a legacy application, managers need to consider long-term, strategic development directions for the organization. This is because if the business processes supported by the application are planned to be triggered or terminated in the foreseeable future, then it may not be worthwhile to devote resources to the modernization of the current software.

To what extent does your current IT system support the company's business objectives?

Discover where your IT system is headed! Take our free survey and get a comprehensive picture of the state of your current IT architecture. Learn about your system's strengths and areas for improvement, and find out how well it meets today's technology requirements. At the end of the survey, you will learn about the obsolescence of your current system, as well as receive personalized proposals for modernization.

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Finally, remember that all organizations are made up of people! It happens that the modernization of the current system violates internal organizational interests. This is the case, for example, if the purpose of the operation of an organizational unit is to operate the application within the IT organization, or if a significant part of the work of a business organization is synchronization between the old and the new system. In such cases, the manager will weigh the impact of the loss of interest in accordance with their own professional objectives and may choose to maintain the legacy system instead.

When is it worth deciding to modernize?

It is common that the application, due to its structure, is no longer able to meet the business needs that arise. This may be due to a reduced user experience or because the emerging needs of new users can no longer be served by the system. In such cases, it is necessary to maintain additional, supporting systems, which entail a significant cost.

The scalability of systems based on old technologies is severely limited. Performance and stability issues in the application can cause a decrease in the user experience. Long load times and regularly crashing systems take significant resources away from value-creating work.

It is also a source of problems that outdated systems are often not compatible with newer technology. In order to address this, instead of solutions that are sustainable in the long term, we need continuous paths and different “bridging” technologies. Maintaining these solutions also increases the costs of the IT organization, even if it is not directly located in the budget of the legacy system on the expense item line. By modernizing the legacy system, these compatability issues are eliminated.

It is also common that, due to outdated technologies, it is no longer possible to find professionals with adequate training to develop and maintain the system. If the specialist becomes unavailable in the case of a critical business process support system, the entire organization faces a critical risk. This can even cause the system to malfunction, which no organization can afford.

Maintaining legacy systems also reduces the organization's ability to innovate. All legacy system modernization also involves changes in strategic processes. From a different perspective, all this means that maintaining outdated legacy systems preserves current processes, as employees of the organization are forced to adapt their business activities to the constraints of the system. This type of operation inhibits innovation, thus reducing the efficiency and market advantage of the organization.

There are also frequent cases where current systems no longer meet regulatory, industry or even the standards set by the parent company. Modernization of legacy software is also inevitable.

How to start modernization?

The question is not whether organizations should move to modernize legacy software, but when? Sooner or later, any system will reach the end of its life cycle.

If the decision is not clear, it is worth conducting a software modernization survey, during which it is clearly determined whether there is a need to replace the system by assessing the current legacy technology and comparing the strategic objectives of the organization. The survey also shows how resource-intensive software modernization is.

Author: Attila Evanics - United Consult

Literature used

https://www.softwareone.com/en/now/cio-pulse-2023-budgets-and-priorities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_system

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Replacing-vs-maintaining-legacy-systems