Replacing a Legacy System: Part-1

Legacy applications are like “First Love”, really hard to let-go! Whilst, it’s an up-hill task to replace them, there are multifarious reasons why replacing a legacy application is beneficial. Here are few reasons that are critical and deciding factors for replacing legacy applications.

• Cost or Cost-Effectiveness

This is a prime factor for replacing legacy systems. Major chunk of money goes into maintaining the applications and without debate, any organization would have to do so; but is it worth maintaining an app with almost obsolete technology. If I were a CFO, I shall always ask “What ROI does supporting my current app bring vs replacing it with new one?”. Whilst, replacement cost of the legacy application is lower than maintaining it, hence it’s a desirable action in this direction.

• Integration Challenges

Legacy systems do not always integrate well with the latest technology systems and integration-pain via custom-written apps is more than replacing the entire system. In the era of IOT (and ubiquitous computing) where all devices communicate with each-other and integration is seamless, it makes more sense of adapting the new technology and replacing the old ones.

• Productivity

Productivity is another enabler in replacement of legacy systems. As basic definition of business changes from product-centric to customer centric, use-case have become more complex. Legacy systems have been doing the heavy lifting (amending and sustaining) at the price of productivity (cost and time). New technology and apps have configurable business-rule-engine, that enhances productivity and makes the process of future adaption more sublime.

• Laid-back Decision Making

Decision Making has been a challenge while using legacy application because, accessing data and churning out meaningful insights (data analytics) require a separate decision making system. Data from the legacy has to be transformed and refreshed into the decision making system coupled with reporting solution for presentation. Business stake-holders always took “reactive” decisions based on the historic trends (or incidents in terms of security). With the advent of bleeding-edge technology and in-memory data processing, stake-holders are in a position to take pro-active decisions (also mitigate timely risks in terms of security)

Now that you understand WHY legacy applications should be replaced; In my next blog, I shall try to list down important technical challenges that we overcome for smooth replacement.

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