Traditionally, companies’ business growth has been hindered by legacy systems. It’s imperative to update outdated systems that add no value as business dynamics change and customer behavior evolves. This is not something cool like owning a retro car. Its value does not increase over time.
In reality, it slows down your operations and increases the time it takes for your product to reach the market. If you want to remain competitive in the face of your disruptors, you must fulfill customers’ orders and expectations at a fast pace, whether you are an e-commerce operator, logistics company, or supply chain firm. Utilizing legacy system modernization services is imperative to integrating such capabilities in business.
What is the Need for Application Modernization?
A software update is not enough to modernize traditional software. Organizations must be prepared for digital disruption by updating their software. Legacy technology is the main obstacle to business digital transformation. A recent study by Logical also supports this observation, highlighting that 4 out of 10 CIOs of large multinational companies believe replacing existing systems is a major barrier to digital transformation.
According to a study by Deloitte, modernizing existing software systems is a key business priority for companies worldwide. Those who have already completed the modernization journey are beginning to reap the benefits.
According to the report, “legacy solutions lack flexibility and carry significant technology debt due to dated languages, databases, architectures, and a limited supply of baby-boomer programmers.”
According to the Deloitte study, staying technologically relevant and delivering products at a faster pace were the two key drivers behind legacy system upgrades across companies.
Why Modernize Legacy Systems?
Your business can remain competitive and efficient by using legacy application modernization services in today’s increasingly digital business environment. Additionally, it allows you to better meet stakeholder and customer expectations, and deliver products and services to the market quicker.
There are several reasons to modernize legacy systems, according to recent studies:
- Enhance competitive advantage by building unique, future-proof technologies
- to simplify business processes, reduce risk, and boost performance.
- Boost customer satisfaction and employee engagement.
- Ensure an agile, innovative IT infrastructure.
- Prevent internal and external data breaches.
- Make your business more efficient by addressing system inefficiencies.
- Find new customers and expand your business.
Let’s examine each of them in more detail:
- Identify and resolve integration and compatibility issues
For running your business operations more efficiently, your legacy system must work well with newer enterprise applications, tools, and other software.
You can integrate a chatbot into your business and a CRM, for instance. This should not disrupt any of your existing processes. In the case of a decade-old system, your customers will sooner shift to other providers that provide better integration and scalability support.
- Reduce the risk of IT security threats
According to reliable market research, outdated systems are vulnerable to malware, data breaches, and other cyber threats. Poor vendor support contributes to poor security in legacy systems. In such a scenario, enterprise software development companies cease to update, add modules, and implement functionality in legacy systems per the latest security standards. By keeping your systems up to date, you’ll avoid security risks.
- The optimization of business processes
Legacy systems become slow and glitch over time, crashing frequently. As a result, organizations are unable to accomplish routine tasks promptly. Deployment time should be measured in days and weeks rather than months in a time when “fast is profitable.” Legacy systems bind businesses to workflows that are less efficient in today’s digital world. Switching from legacy systems to digital and agile processes is indeed longer and more resource-intensive, but imagine the benefits and profits your business could realize ten years from now.
- Respond to changing client requests more quickly
Agile development often leads to changes in functionality or the addition of new features. However, using legacy systems and processes limit your teams’ ability to integrate new functionality and serve clients faster. The outdated system often relies on outdated technology infrastructure, which is difficult to upgrade.
- Support for Mobility
By implementing cloud-based and mobile-first devices, enterprises can improve performance, access, and usability over legacy systems. Cloud-based solutions provide round-the-clock support, maintenance, and regular updates. In the same way, mobile-first development allows remote workers operating in sensitive industries such as oil & gas, construction, and so on to have seamless connectivity.
- Excessive resource usage and hardware dependency should be avoided
Your business incurs IT costs overruns when using outdated, on-premise systems. In addition to administrative and operating expenses, the total cost of ownership of such solutions is high. When you move from legacy systems to cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, you don’t even need a dedicated server to run your operations.
According to data, you can save up to 65% of your IT infrastructure costs after three years of using the cloud. Less reliance on expensive data centers, servers, etc., contributes to this. Your system performance and response times will also be improved by running your applications in the cloud.
- Meeting Regulatory Compliance Requirements with Ease
In addition to their non-compliance with industry standards, legacy systems are undesirable. Making traditional systems work in line with industry standards and practices is a difficult task requiring frequent changes in the design. A major cost centre for businesses is non-compliance with any of the IT industry’s software standards. You can lose millions of dollars if you fail to comply with the General Data Protection Regulations when you build your software.
Conclusion
We hope you have gained a good understanding of why legacy systems need to be updated in the digital era. Taking that risk will pay off in the long run. To ensure long-term success, whether you are reorganizing your entire system or adding new capabilities to existing enterprise software.
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