How To Solve Legacy System Problems

The service industry is growing by leaps and bounds every year, and competition always gets tougher.

It’s never good to be behind the curve in this space.

Still, some companies still rely on many legacy systems, such as ancient apps or antiquated IT systems.

Using outdated legacy systems can handicap your company and reduce sales.

If the company wants to boost its sales and long-term outlook, replacing legacy systems with updated digital products is essential.

If you have old systems in your company that hold you back, read more about how your company can replace legacy systems and enjoy better business.

Table of Contents

How Do Legacy Systems Cripple Your Business?

When you have legacy systems in your organization, you might be unaware of how limiting they are.

Below are some of the most severe ways legacy systems can affect your organization:

Legacy Systems Aren’t Mobile Compatible

Mobile devices are a constant presence in our lives, and using them as one of the benefits of your digital transformation from a legacy system is essential. Fast, convenient mobile apps are easy to access anytime and anywhere. This convenience boosts operational speed and employee productivity. Companies that don’t have employees doing business on mobile are far behind their peers.

Legacy software rarely supports cell phones and tablets, so it’s difficult to get onto the system other than in the office.

Only being able to access critical systems on your office PC means more travel costs, office costs, and reduced productivity in usual business processes.

If your employees have cell phones and tablets with essential company systems, they can often work from anywhere.

Legacy Systems Include More Security Risks

Legacy systems have been around for years or decades and there are greater security risks when you use them. On the other hand, the security of the cloud, particularly as it relates to cloud storage, is well known and is far superior to legacy systems. Also, someone logging into the office network on a legacy system has to do their work pretty much in the office. Cloud users can work anywhere with broadband.

Other problems with maintaining legacy systems security are:

The old system may not be able to get support from the vendor that designed it.
The legacy system doesn’t get regular security updates and may not have in years.
It’s challenging for your IT support team because only a handful of developers know that old system.
Legacy IT doesn’t support modern lean IT theories.

Legacy Systems Provide a Poor User Experience

Many legacy applications are cumbersome because of outdated software features and functions.

If that’s the case, clearly your users will have a degraded experience. And with a poor experience, workers may have trouble using the legacy apps to their potential.

Poor user experience also prevents the retention of current clients and even attracting new ones.

Legacy systems modernization can address these challenges by updating outdated programming languages and optimizing workflows. By transitioning to new systems, you can enhance efficiency and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Legacy Systems May Be Slow & Crash Often

If your system at work crashes daily and you’re like, ‘yeah that happens a lot,’ that’s a big issue. Sure, you can try workarounds and limiting system functions, but that means the company isn’t working at full technical capacity.

Also, waiting two minutes to create a business report is normal. But if you must execute complex workarounds to do this, your legacy software needs to go.

Legacy Systems Can’t Integrate With New Tech

It’s vital that your software is compatible with the growth of your business. But legacy systems don’t allow the business to spread its wings as the future unfolds. The company is shacked to an old system that works independently from modern digitized formats.

Remember that tech changes every year and if your company wants to remain a leader, prioritize legacy system modernization with a newer solution. When your team embraces new system solutions, you’ll be able to use software modernization and solutions on the market.

Examples of legacy systems often include outdated operating systems that can no longer support the latest applications, making data migration crucial for seamless integration into modern platforms. By modernizing, you’ll not only enhance functionality but also ensure that your business is future-proof.

How To Overcome Legacy System Issues

Now that you know your firm might have an existing legacy system problem, what do you do? Some ways to tackle these old systems are:

Encapsulate

You can preserve your legacy system by reducing network access to functions and existing data with a modern firewall. After your team air-gaps the software, make its functions as services with API to continue using legacy systems with the most value.

This method allows you to focus on compliance, performance, and network infrastructure security problems of legacy software systems. But going the air-gapping route is only a short-term fix. Encapsulating outdated technology won’t help with upgrades or maintenance.

Rehost

A recent survey found that keeping costs under control on the public cloud was a major challenge in using cloud services for small and medium-sized companies.

But a managed private cloud gives you a cost-effective and dependable way to overcome legacy system issues.

Rewrite

You may have the programming team rewrite the code to address legacy problems. But revising software can be difficult to execute as you delve into old code and need to decipher outdated computer systems languages.

However, you may need to rewrite the software if the system is vital to the mission and the framework is old and depreciated.

It also may be a good choice if your staff can’t maintain the system without rewriting it. Last, if the costs of maintaining the system are less than a rewrite, that could be the way to go.

This process also may involve refactoring, which is the idea of altering the internal build of the code without changing its function on the outside.

For instance, if you have a snippet of code that makes calculations, refactoring will make some code be different and better written. But that piece of code will still be making calculations like before.

Refactoring code can be better because it does its work in small chunks, including tiny changes that are easy for the QA team to check and test. Then, the changes can be integrated quickly into the legacy code.

Fixing the Challenges & Problems of Legacy Systems

Dealing with security and other challenges with legacy systems is always a challenge.

But many signs of exposed and outdated systems aren’t hard to find.

If your legacy systems show any of the signs we listed above, it could be time to take action to improve the use and security of your systems.

Our technical software development team can help you with your next legacy system migration.

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Ryan Nead

VP Sales at Software Development Company

Ryan is the VP of Operations for DEV.co. He brings over a decade of experience in managing custom website and software development projects for clients small and large, managing internal and external teams on meeting and exceeding client expectations--delivering projects on-time and within budget requirements. Ryan is based in El Paso, Texas.
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