Tips to Modernizing Your Legacy Software – Risks and Rewards

Summary: Technology is constantly evolving, and with the rise of modern software, so are customer expectations. Modernizing legacy software has emerged as one of the finest strategies for businesses that want to thrive and elevate their CX. Read this article to know the top reasons why businesses must consider and prioritize modernizing their software, digital products, and applications.

What was once an object of aspiration slowly lost relevance, and no one noticed!

I am talking about BB or Blackberry, which used to hold a monopoly on handheld devices. However, their market share plummeted considerably with the emergence of iPhone and Android.

Experts in digital transformation say that the trailblazer fell from the helm due to its minimal adaptation to the changing market. It held back from moving from its interactive pager 950 and instant BB to BB messaging to the touch screen technology and completely lost the market.

This is perhaps one of the finest examples of understanding the harm that legacy technology could do to your business. And should serve as a jumpstart to avoid challenges in modernizing your enterprise software you probably built a decade ago with technologies relevant to the needs of that era.

And probably your customers too are wondering why you lack in addressing their evolving needs!

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Let’s first see a traditional explanation:

Legacy Software – A Definition

A legacy software system is a critical business solution built with old technologies that is keeping some business functions alive but is also a roadblock for scaling and innovation.

Old tech dies hard – this is typically true for most businesses that are powered with outdated tech solutions, but the purpose these software solutions serve is so critical to business continuity that organizations often hesitate to improvise them for fear of jeopardizing the operations and workflow.

However, the outdated tech in legacy systems often hinders supporting advanced features, cloud integrations, or any next-gen innovation. But let’s say it's only the tip of the iceberg. The real-world problems run deeper.

Different Kinds of Legacy Systems

Although there’s a huge list of complications that can arise out of traditional software, many businesses still prefer using legacy systems for their familiarity, in spite of wider repercussions.

Here are a few kinds of legacy systems based on redundancies:

• EOL: End of Life systems are those that have reached their mature stage and have been discontinued by vendors.
• Outdated Architecture: These age-old systems have outdated data and code architectures which make it impossible for them to thrive.
• Unable to Scale: Such software solutions lack the capacity to accommodate and support new functionalities which makes them obsolete or unusable in parts.
• No Available Updates: This software literally has no new versions or updates available. Having software like this means you literally have to create a new process because it obstructs innovation in all ways.

Let’s now explore the potential challenges that legacy software can bring to your business.

How Do Legacy Systems Fail You?

The goal of every rapidly growing business is in offering market-relevant solutions to its customers, optimizing and streamlining business operations for wider productivity and EX, and protecting business data from rising cyber vulnerabilities.

A recent AWS and Tata Consultancy survey reveals that businesses that still use legacy software face three epic issues – 61% of such respondents face challenges with integrating new applications, 57% reported a considerable lack of business agility, and another staggering 55% spoke about security exposure.

And most of these firms still run their core and critical business processes on dated ERPs, stone-age IBM mainframes, systems built on Lotus Notes, COBOL, SharePoint, etc.

Let’s now explore the various ways in which legacy software can harm your business:

Dwindling Efficiencies

The worst part of outdated software is that they require huge administrative attention to help them perform their basic functions. Apart from a waste of time and resources, using legacy software means over time it becomes a challenge to keep up the regular functioning of the software, leave aside innovation and upgrades. This ultimately translates to affecting your bottom line.

Fun part? In a few years’ time, you won’t even find people who know how to run these!

Downtime and System Failures

With technologies evolving every second, your legacy software cannot be updated beyond a limit. In fact, in most cases, software and applications built with traditional technologies become unsupportive to the point that they are removed from the market. This often leads to periods of frequent downtime, ultimately resulting in complete system failures.

Security Vulnerabilities

With the rapid evolution of technology, the threat landscape too has become more diverse. Your outdated software and applications do not have the capacity to pass advanced security measures. Industry-grade security measures like single-sign on, multi-factor authentication, role-based access, audit trails, encryptions, and real-time threat monitoring are new-age functionalities that your dated software cannot accommodate.

Wait, something’s cooking here! Our experts have listed the top reasons why you must modernize your legacy software. Take a look!

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Top Reasons to Modernize Legacy Software

Cloud technologies and cloud-native programming models have been around for a while now. However, many established businesses still use enterprise software that runs on classic stacks.

The aim of legacy software modernization is to improve the performance of your existing solutions, make them more interoperable, deliver a seamless experience to users, and thus, improve ROI.

When it comes to modernizing your legacy software, you must determine what to transform because not all solutions need to be or can be modernized. But by modernizing software that is strategic to the business, you will actually find how the benefits outweigh the costs.

There are majorly three reasons why you’d want to modernize your software:

• Minimized costs
• Operational agility
• Seamless experiences

Reducing Operational Costs

Cost consideration is one of the huge aspects when it comes to modernizing legacy systems. You need to weigh two aspects - the cost of moving your legacy systems to new technologies vs keeping them as they are.

Licensing Cost

Most traditional software solutions come with licensing fees. However, new-age software platforms are mostly open-sourced, which means if you opt for it, you get free commercial support. Besides, open-source solutions come with developer communities which are a huge source of help and quick fixes.

Resource Cost

Running enterprise software on virtual machines is a resource-intensive process. However, when you modernize your legacy software, run them on containers and modern libraries, you do not just save a lot of memory, but balance workloads better without any code change requirement.

Support Cost

With most legacy systems the problem now is that either the official support has expired, or you do not get to find resources who can manage stone-age software. Modernizing such software solutions to the cloud wherever possible is your best bet for cutting down costs.

Integrating Operational Agility

The pace of change in all industries continues to accelerate. To keep up with evolving technology, to meet and exceed user expectations, and to introduce new features and capabilities rapidly, your critical applications need to evolve.

Brand New Features

Software solutions built years back in time often lead to substantial technical debt. While it is important to keep your software functional for the purpose it is solving, it is also important to build newer features to meet market demands. Refactoring and rearchitecting software that can be extended brings you the benefits of fresh capabilities and new-found efficiencies.

Faster Time-to-Market

Deploying monolithic software often proves to be a pain. When you use DevOps practices like CI/CD or containerization, it helps with seamless software deployment in lesser timeframes. In fact, refactoring monolithic software into microservices enables you to modernize parts of your software separately and CI/CD even lets you roll back to your present versions if the upgrade doesn’t work as expected.

Future-Ready Platforms

When you decide to adopt containerization, orchestration, or cloud-native architectures, you actually unlock the benefits of a futuristic platform like ongoing support and stable platform performance.

Seamless User Experiences

In the constantly evolving tech landscape, the end user is the king. And a favorable CX is hugely driven by enhancing experiences. Easily navigable and top-notch features take you miles closer to user satisfaction.

Improved User Experiences

No matter how good a software you launch, if your users aren’t happy with it, your project tanks. Your age-old legacy software accrues numerous weaknesses over time, which are a roadblock to an upbeat user experience. This alone should be your most pressing reason to modernize them.

Improved Developer experiences

Although neglected the most, building positive developer experiences is something that you must prioritize to ensure success for your software project. One aspect of it is productivity, with modern tech like the use of containers and other modular service-based architectures, your developers do the work faster and your development timelines are accelerated. The other side of the coin being, working with dated technology means you fall in the loop of a skill gap. Because not a lot of new-age developers prefer or even know how to work with ancient technologies.

Now, before you get into the process of modernizing your legacy software you must take into consideration a few challenges that might arise in the process.

Challenges That May Arise When Modernizing Legacy Software

Modernizing and upgrading your software is a complex process and the journey of modernization differs from organization to organization depending upon the state of the software, the complexity of code, the requirement of advancement technologies, and the budget constraints of the business.

Accruing Technical Debt

You must remember that the real reason why you decided to go ahead and modernize your legacy systems – avoiding inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. So, if you go ahead with a band-aid approach just to expedite the process, you will end up building more technical debt for your business. Building poor or compromised quality code is a sure shot recipe for digital transformation failure.

Solution

• Refactor and restructure legacy codes to make them more adaptable and aligned to the needs of your business.
• Make your software future-ready by moving to cloud-native environments, optimize cost-effectiveness, and improve its scalability.
• Automate and integrate the functions of your development and IT operations teams to become more agile in practice and responsive towards how your software reacts to user needs.

Not Prioritizing Security Measures

One of the considerations for upgrading legacy software is enhancing security measures at par with the modern threat landscape. Thus, it becomes a necessity to incorporate security measures in the architecture and design of the modernized solution to prevent any security compromises.

• It is essential to get into a broad risk assessment procedure so that you can identify all potential threats and areas of improvement.
• Integrate modern security measures like access control, data protection, and encryption protocols to be at par with emerging vulnerabilities rising from new-age software.
• To combat the threat landscape, global governing bodies are continuously reviewing and upgrading compliance requirements. Your modernized software must comply with regional and global compliances to find wider acceptability.

Not Being Future Focused

When modernizing your legacy solutions, you must lean on building capabilities that make your business ready for disruptions of the future. You can consider:

• Build APIs that help design meaningful connections between the modernized software and existing solutions to enhance your overall software ecosystem.
• Use advanced frameworks that streamline, simplify, and optimize development by providing readymade solutions for a host of challenges.
• Incorporate advanced technologies like AI, cloud computing, blockchain, automation, etc. to deliver features and functionalities that your end users need.

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