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A brief guide to legacy system modernization
2020-12-07 23:04:08| The Webmail Blog
A brief guide to legacy system modernization nellmarie.colman Mon, 12/07/2020 - 16:04 As we enter a new era of AI advances and data-driven business models, businesses are taking a fresh look at their technology systems. Instead of seeing IT as a cost required to run their business, theyre recognizing that technology can be an asset that grows their business. Your legacy systems may have fueled your growth in the past, but theyre reaching a maturity point. As you embark on new paths and strategies such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud strategies like AI and IoT youll likely end up, like most businesses, ignoring your old systems. But dont linger in this stall or dilemma zone. Its time to unlock the data and intelligence held in your legacy systems and include them in your digital transformation journey. In this guide, well discuss how to make this happen so you can position yourself to meet customer demands and business challenges and redefine your business. What is a legacy system? A legacy system refers to outdated infrastructure, applications and processes. Typically housed in monolithic and tightly coupled environments, legacy systems generally run on software and hardware that is customer-owned, hosted, managed and supported. Although these systems are functional, they can create a financial burden to maintain, require difficult-to-find IT skills to operate and hinder your ability to innovate. What is legacy modernization? Legacy modernization is the process of updating and optimizing business systems to gain operational efficiencies, address technology constraints, meet customer experience expectations and support adoption and integration with other systems based on newer technology platforms. The process of legacy modernization is initiated when organizations find themselves stuck between maintaining older, expensive hardware that is unable to interoperate with new technologies, and undertaking the monumental task of revamping infrastructure to take advantage of a best-fit platform to support its business goals. This leads CIOs and IT leaders to balance a variety of factors to determine the time to modernization, where modernization delivers the most impact and how to properly plan the project to reduce business disruptions. The minimum goal of legacy system modernization is to achieve a like-to-like system parity with operational enhancements. The ideal goal is to achieve significant leaps in performance, agility and innovation. Legacy modernization can range widely on the spectrum. One option may be to refactor code using migration tools to run the same system with minimal code changes on more modern infrastructure. In some cases, emulators are available that let you avoid code changes altogether. On the other end is completely re-architecting the system, replacing the legacy system with one built using cloud native development tools. Legacy system modernization strategies Most legacy modernization projects can take either a revolutionary or evolutionary approach. Revolutionary modernization Revolutionary modernization refers to a complete, from-the-ground-up infrastructure transformation. For example, mergers and acquisitions frequently require this approach when one business must quickly adapt to the infrastructure of the new entity. Another common application of a revolutionary approach is where the legacy system has gone beyond being a burden and has become a risk. A common problem is when legacy systems are no longer supported by their vendors, which leaves organizations with security or compliance holes, and no new patches or updates. This approach presents risk, disruption and higher costs. Evolutionary modernization More risk-averse organizations usually choose the evolutionary method. The evolutionary modernization approach is a multi-phased, long-term model to achieve the same goals as the revolutionary approach. With the evolutionary approach, organizations take a workload-by-workload path to modernization, modernizing one workload at a time. This slower approach reduces business disruptions and spreads costs over time. Organizations locked into vendor contracts might take this approach to modernize around the legacy system while waiting for contracts to expire. Also, hybrid models allow organizations to connect cloud resources to on-premises environments to support evolutionary legacy transformation. Six considerations for choosing a legacy modernization approach To decide between adopting an evolutionary or a revolutionary approach, you should start with a thorough evaluation of your operations to determine the best path forward. The evaluation process should include assessing the following considerations: 1. Workload Audit applications and software to determine their business value, criticality and where there are opportunities to modernize. Assess workloads holistically in context of the go-forward business direction. 2. Architecture Review infrastructure elements, performance and ROI to assess where newer technologies can deliver better outcomes. 3. Financial Evaluate spend to find budget burdens and ways to optimize resources to support current operations and prepare for whats next. 4. Risk Weigh the possible disruption to the business, as well as any associated impacts to business processes and organizational culture against the desired outcomes of your legacy system modernization project. Also consider the risk of keeping the legacy system as-is, including maintenance for out-of-support systems or those with limited resource support staff. 5. Operations Determine which new skill sets, training and processes need to be factored into modernization costs and timelines. 6. Security Plan ways to protect systems before, during and after modernization to avoid data loss, outages or exposure. In the security plan, organizations should confirm adherence to governmental and industry compliance regulations in the new environment. The benefits of legacy system modernization Modernization offers the following payoffs: Operational efficiency: Modernized IT systems deliver better performance, faster time-to-market and better experiences for internal and external customers. Reduced costs: Decommissioning monolithic apps, data center space and physical servers reduces software, hardware and licensing costs. IT agility: With modernized systems, you can tune your environment to react faster to seasonal fluctuations, leverage data across the organization, integrate systems to optimize processes, adapt to business conditions or quickly jump on the next innovation opportunity to beat your competitors to the marketplace. Why do you need a legacy system update? Factors that driv
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