Before your legacy system gets shut down due to obsolescence, take advantage of the superior performance and competitiveness that new technologies can bring to your business. Whether you lead a big or small company, there is no doubt that a strong data and management infrastructure is key to being successful in the market. In their recent CIO priorities report, Flexera (2020) revealed that the top priority in digital transformation is customer experience with 69%, so meeting market expectations is a driver for companies to invest in new technologies.
The improved use of services and technologies is another concern. While older systems can continue to operate, you can reduce infrastructure costs and related issues by simply considering other alternatives. According to AWS (2020), the companies that run in the cloud generally use 77% fewer servers and 84% less power.
That’s when a system migration begins to disrupt your business and expand your capabilities. Know that you are aware, understand why a legacy system modernization is necessary, and implement this process step by step.
Pros and Risks of Updating Your Legacy System
If you want to implement a legacy system migration workbench, you must understand your business advantages and challenges. Make sure you are thinking about this in the short and long term.
Pros of Modernizing Your Legacy System
While a legacy system involves old-fashioned tools and platforms, its maintenance requires expensive physical infrastructure and hardware that may be difficult to find due to their obsolescence. In this sense, doing a system migration would mean easier, less expensive maintenance.
Sometimes, you will only need to click through an automated update of programs, tools, and platforms to be up to date with their latest integrations. In other cases, you will need the assistance of an IT expert to monitor the system. However, you will have less difficulty replacing old cables and shielding data with limited software options.
That is to say, a system migration will make your business more efficient on applications and platforms are given that new technologies can run without the integration issues associated with either existing or old software. This modernization also means the implementation of more intuitive tools. You can use them to collect data, insights, management facilities, and encrypted information.
Creating a system migration will also provide you with more security in terms of data loss or damage to infrastructure. Modern systems have constant software updates that improve data protection and security methods. When these modifications are part of digital environments, you won’t have to worry about having USB or CD backups.
Risks of Modernizing Your System
However, when you are creating a legacy system migration workbench, it is common to find poor compatibility between older and new software and related hardware. Beyond that, data loss is a major concern. Thus, it’s important that you have data backup and know exactly the required type of legacy system modernization to avoid inconveniences.
Not only can the aforementioned issues emerge, but so can the team’s integration with this new technology. In this sense, the implementation time of the system migration is something to ask. Because you and your team need to find replacements for these programs and applications and be ready to use new technology to do basic training.
While the costs of legacy system modernization may look expensive at first sight and in the short term, this approach will significantly reduce costs in the medium and long term. Again, you need to decide what type of migration you want, but the maintenance costs, data backup, and loss of time on certain processes will be less than keeping your legacy systems running at full speed and reliability.
How to Modernize Your Legacy System
When you think about system migration, you should ask yourself what are the main barriers and limitations that your legacy systems imply for your business. In addition to a lack of scalability, you must prioritize certain areas of digital transformation according to your company’s goals. Do you want to discover what your business needs to modernize? Try our Digital Transformation Calculator tool.
There is more than one practice for creating a legacy system migration. In fact, it would be better if you implemented this process in stages and didn’t replace all the software in one go.
This means you need to understand where the data is, what its vulnerabilities are, and how to proceed with modernization. Then, as a project, identify and determine the requirements of a system migration process that will include time, technical resources, and costs. Your updates can be based on migration, improvement, rebuilding, or replacement of the software. Once you have established your strategy and plan, a few estimates are required to include you in the different pre, during, and post-stages of the modernization process.
First, it’s important to make a backup of the data as well as inventory and file saves in various formats. Second, execute the legacy system migration workbench in the right stage and perform system tests once you implement each phase. This will save you from a few issues before you run the next phase and lose important data. Finally, you must include regular checks on the platform as part of the maintenance of your legacy systems.
To Keep in Mind
During this process, you must keep your team up to date with training and important information. In this way, you will ensure easy integration with new technologies. Remember that this takes time and can imply higher costs if you take this for granted. We suggest you prioritize both technological and human adaptation in your legacy system migration approach.
Recommendations to Operate your Legacy System during the Migration
According to Deloitte (2017), businesses favored fewer operating resources (28%), hardware/software costs (20%), and quality improvements (20%) in terms of expense reductions. With less importance, respondents mentioned the reduction of IT resources (12%). These facts show that even when over two-thirds of the participants are in a legacy system modernization, there are some areas that require some attention. This given the migration has not been fully implemented.
Given the vital role those legacy systems represent in a business, you must consider the existing solutions in your migration strategy to create a hybrid environment that can be used to manage the migration process. While the entire migration takes several resources, your team can implement alternative data-saving practices. This includes cloud services to reduce the amount of information stored in old systems. This also includes the use of other programs and tools to meet deadlines as the update will take some time.
Even when modernizing or replacing a legacy system can be seen as a difficult task due to a large amount of data, this process will benefit your company. Throughout the entire process, Advancio’s professional and highly specialized team will help you choose the correct migration strategy for you. What are you waiting for? Modernize your Legacy System.
