How to Get Off of Legacy Software
Does your current software fail often and no longer meet your business needs? Are you planning to upgrade to or invest in custom software development to meet your business needs?
According to a survey conducted by Alpha FMC, 80% of their business firm respondents have prioritized their digital transformation; while 69% considered their legacy technology as the main obstacle for their digital improvements.
Legacy software is outdated software that still plays a critical role in the day-to-day operations of an organization.
Legacy software can be harmful to your business as it is often:
Hard to integrate with new applications.
Expensive and difficult to maintain.
Prone to frequent technical problems and system failures.
Vulnerable to security breaches that expose your valuable business information to hackers.
Read on to know more about how to upgrade or modernize your business legacy software to improve your business processes and operations.
In this article, we explore:
Problems with Legacy Software
Legacy software is often unstable and inefficient. It can cause big problems in your day-to-day business operations.
It is important for business owners to understand how legacy software hampers business growth. This will give them a better understanding of why they need to modernize their software.
Here are some problems that business owners encountered while using their legacy software.
Valuable business data become more vulnerable to security breaches. Cybersecurity is one of the main concerns for businesses that use legacy software. Legacy software often lacks vendor support for security updates. This puts business data at risk of possible security breaches or access by cybercriminals.
Data breaches can damage your business reputations and lead to financial losses. According to IBM's Cost of Data Breach Report for 2020, the average cost of a data breach is USD 3.86 million.
Extremely high maintenance costs. Every business software requires regular updates, support, and maintenance to keep up with business demands. To keep legacy software running requires an extremely high maintenance cost.
According to Applied Computing and Informatics, financial services organizations allocate 75% of their IT budgets maintaining legacy systems.
- Integration with new software is difficult. Legacy software is not designed to integrate with the latest technologies.
- Difficulty to meet client needs. Legacy software can hinder businesses from interacting with their clients effectively because of its incompatibility with new technologies.
- Decrease in performance and productivity. Application software is intended to increase business operations performance and productivity. But using legacy software for your business operations does the opposite. Unexpected technical issues and failures will slow down your daily operations.
Reasons Why You Should Replace Your Business Legacy Software
Using legacy software that keeps on failing is quite risky. It slows down your business processes and operations, causing a decrease in productivity and revenue.
Here are some of the signs why you need to modernize your legacy software today:
Legacy software is inefficient, often crashes and fails. It slows down your business operations, performance, and productivity.
Business application is expected to help improve your business performance and productivity. If your business software is outdated, slow, and keeps crashing as you perform your day-to-day operations then it is already a sign that your software needs modernization.
Legacy software support and maintenance costs become too expensive over time.
Support and maintenance are necessary for every software to properly address failures and make it perform efficiently.
Operating your business with legacy software is quite expensive because it requires critical support and maintenance more often to fix issues and improve performance to meet business needs.
If the cost of your legacy software maintenance keeps on increasing over time then this is a sign that your software already needs an upgrade or modernization.
Your legacy software is hardware-dependent and requires too complex and expensive infrastructure.
In general, most legacy software runs on an in-house server with a specific type of hardware and operating system making its costs extremely high because of the administrative expenses to run your software efficiently.
If the operating cost of your legacy system is becoming higher and higher over time then this is one of the signs that you need software modernization.
Keeping your legacy software data secure is too expensive.
Due to a lack of vendor support, most legacy software can become more vulnerable to potential threats that allow unauthorized individuals to easily access valuable business data and transactions. To keep your software data secured you need to:
Increase vendor service charges to keep your legacy software data secure.
Hire experts to improve legacy software security and resolve issues.
When securing your business software data become impossible and too expensive then this is another sign that you already need software modernization.
Your legacy software is not scalable and not compatible with mobile and other enterprise programs.
Unlike today's applications that are designed to work with multiple programs and devices, legacy software is designed to work with a specific purpose, programming language, hardware, and operations.
Legacy software has its own limitations that:
It is hardware-dependent.
It can not scale easily when your business grows.
It does not have mobile or web compatibilities.
When your legacy software is not capable to grow as your business grows and you can no longer meet your clients' expectations then this is another sign that you already need software modernization.
Difficulty to hire IT specialists that can manage legacy software.
To effectively manage your business legacy software, an IT specialist with specific skills and expertise is required.
IT professionals of today's generation are not trained or do not have enough knowledge with old computer languages being used by your legacy software.
The shortage of IT professionals with the required skills and expertise can be a big problem to keep your legacy software running.
Benefits of Legacy Software Modernization to Your Business
Legacy software modernization is the conversion or rewriting of legacy software to a modern programming language, software libraries, protocols, or hardware platforms to avoid unnecessary risks and take advantage of the new technologies.
Legacy software modernization provides several benefits to your business processes and operations. These are as follows:
It gives your business a competitive edge.
It reduces operation and maintenance costs.
It improves business performance and productivity.
It boosts and improves security features to prevent internal and external security breaches and threats.
It improves user experience and increases customer satisfaction.
It helps increase revenues.
It improves software functionalities with reduced risks.
It improves software flexibility, accessibility, and mobility.
Steps to modernize your legacy software
Legacy system modernization is quite challenging and requires proper planning, enough time, and preparations to effectively execute.
Here are the steps to consider when modernizing your business legacy software:
Evaluate and assess your current business software.
Choose a modernization approach that fits best for your business needs.
Create a plan or timeline for your legacy software transition.
Prepare complete documentation of all software changes for future growth.
Start executing the modernization process based on the prepared plan.
The Different Approaches to Legacy Software Modernization
The legacy software modernization process can vary depending on the number of features that need to change based on your business needs.
There are different approaches that you can choose when modernizing your business legacy software. These are as follows:
- Replace. In this approach, businesses opt to completely decommission their existing legacy software and replace it with new software to optimize business processes.
- Rebuild. In this approach, businesses rebuild their legacy software to keep the same specifications and design while updating key features of their business software for flexibility and better performance.
- Rehost. In this approach, businesses deploy their legacy software in a new environment like a virtual or cloud infrastructure for better performance and security without modifying their existing software functionalities.
- Rearchitect. In this approach, businesses perform architectural changes or optimization to their legacy software like transferring their monolithic software to microservices or serverless architecture to improve software performance.
- Replatform. In this approach, legacy software components are ported to a different runtime platform by making minimal changes without changing their code structure, functions, and features to improve performance and reduce infrastructure costs.
- Refactor. In this approach, developers edit and clean up legacy software code to reduce duplication and make software code more efficient, reusable, and maintainable.
- Encapsulate. This the fastest, cheapest, and low-risk modernization process for your legacy software. This approach provides a new interface of your legacy software to leverage its functionalities and performance.
Modernizing your business legacy software is significant for your business to become productive and competitive in this rapidly changing technology.
Are you looking for a software development company to help modernize your business legacy software? We can help.
