Legacy Application Modernization – Why we need it

Legacy Application Modernization – Why we need it

Information Technology has always been the spearhead of agility and innovation. State-of-the-art and innovative applications fuels to the organizations’ productivity and growth, accelerate competitive edge and automate key business processes. But trailblazing, applications and systems of yester years become legacy application of today. These application support and enable core business practices and encompasses the mainstream organization’s application assets. However, the languages they are written in are often outdated and might be running on the platform which are no more scalable or no longer integrated with the company’s new technology ecosystem.

Historically, enterprise chose to write custom software rather than purchase IT systems. The bigger and more profitable the organization, the larger were their IT teams, developing customized supplication inimitably tailored to meet their distinctive business demands. With growing organizations, expanding product offering stack, acquiring and merging new business entities, organizations began to lose control of the custom-built applications, software and databases. Unable to cope with the prospective risks of retiring old systems, and switching them with new, consolidated software and applications, many organizations are now confronted with having to sustain and support original legacy systems that can date to up to three decades. Keeping these systems running requires dedicated teams with expert skill sets, which are getting harder to attain in the fast-changing world of Information Technology. Yet, many organizations do not have a flawless strategy for retiring legacy applications and continue to spend up aggressively their IT budgets for supporting the redundant, outdated sometimes completely obsolete systems.

Significantly, the tangled, sprawled application landscape leaves almost no space for impedes business agility and innovation. For instance, without a single, consolidated view of the customer database (DB), it is difficult to create custom-made profile-raising campaigns or introduce tailored product offerings. Again, without a centralized reporting system organizations may make critical mistakes in taking process payments, tracking shipments and product inventory. With many product inventory, tracking shipments, or processing payments. And with many outdated systems running almost the same types of transactions, it becomes very difficult to detect the root cause of the problem, whether the application has a functional or performance error.

Another very common concern with application growth is an exponential increase in data. Even the simplest IT systems are proficient to generate large quantities of data including shipping details, customer information and also the transaction records. Without appropriate archiving procedures, stored data can grow exponentially even up to five percent per month on a large system. The three key factors that contribute to uncontrollable data growth are:

• Acquisitions
• Poor archiving methods
• Lack of perfect internal guiding principle on data retention and compliancy

Many organizations do not have a exact process for eliminating historic data prior to merging application instances, as a result, they often find themselves holding out-of-date transaction records far beyond the required duration.

Most C suits executives cannot exactly approximate the number of out-of-date systems that are running in their application ecology and are being protected by the IT staff. Significantly, they neither have vision on the true cost of maintaining individual applications, nor a clear picture of the ideal number of applications vital to provide real business value and support future evolution. Finding the way out of the ever-increasing application extension and unrestricted data growth is not only a matter of un-cluttering the IT ecosystem and cutting operational costs; it is about finding space for innovation in IT budgets, increasing agility and efficiency and better aligning IT with the business needs.

Conclusion
Senior tech executives must constantly perform a balancing act, by satisfying the evolving demands of the business while getting the most out of their companies’ existing IT systems. With 70 percent of the typical organization’s global dealings running on legacy applications, doing more with less, is no easy feat.

Legacy Application Modernization allows IT to strip out redundant operating costs while reducing capital spend and release IT staff to create value for the business. It help address whether to migrate, re-platform or remediate legacy applications. The outcome: added value from existing applications with reduced costs, limited business disruption and decreased risk.