In today’s blog, we’ll be discussing why some companies still need to stick to legacy systems and what are different problems faced by businesses that are causing a damaging effect on their profit.
Theoretically, it’s hard to define what really ‘legacy system’ is or what’s the role of this software is. Practically, workstations, apps, and tech gadgets fall under this type.
In layman’s term, I’ll mention a few features that define what a legacy system is:
Legacy systems are outmoded – they don’t get any maintenance and can’t be replaced. They aren’t capable of modern systems with more cutting-edge solutions – that’s the reason they’re not purchasable.
Hardware used in power station, industrial machinery running MS-DOS using a computer, or obsolete financial organizations
Here are the 3 big reasons ‘why’ still some companies wanted to stick to this.
- Investment
Up-keeping of a legacy system is pricey over time but still changing with the modern system requires a hefty investment and labor.
- Fear
Upgrading to a new system is hard – it can increase the chances of an internal fight. Instead of getting into that type of situation, many businesses find a solution for the current system they’re working on.
- Difficulty
Legacy software is outdated and made by using ‘old’ programming language but it’s still easy to find a person or company like diceus.com that can do changes or do the migration (planning to shift to a modern system), which is a bit overwhelming.
Problems Caused By Legacy Systems
An old system can be the reason for various difficulties in a corporate setup but we will be discussing the BIG issues that are causing legacy systems to be less likely for other businesses who are looking to shift onto a modern system.
- Requires high maintenance budget
- Lack of top-notch security
- Lack of govt. guidelines
- Data silos – you can’t incorporate with modern systems
Maintenance Budget
To be precise, you need an excessively high budget for keeping a legacy system, it’s like a fragile barrier holding water with holes in it and you’re just patching it whenever you discover a flaw or you need a change. At some point, you’ll reach to ‘point on no return’ just because you won’t be able to update that system or you couldn’t even afford it to.
Lack of Security
At this time, security is everything, your data has more value than your phone or computer from where you’re reading this article. A single data breach can make you bankrupt or make you lose your customer’s trust.
Do you know that 27% of breaches are caused by malicious attacks whereas 37% more costly breaches are caused by system glitches approx… $4.45 million vs. $3.24 million.
Lack of Compliance with Government
Take GDPR as an example, in this policy, a business simply needs to provide and prove what/why/where, and who’s accessing stored customer’s data. If a business is using legacy software’s then it’s impossible to keep track of all these policies and data.
While modern systems are built to scale supply and capacity use on demand.
Lack Of Cross System Integration
With silos data, you don’t have a 360 view of the business. You have to stick to your data and own goals – teamwork can’t be done on this system, let’s say you need ‘inventory status’ rather than pulling up the desired data, you’ve to search for it.
There are very high chances of inaccuracy because you won’t know which data is latest and which is old. This thing also causes you storage shortage, to fulfill it you need to spend money to store data on different platforms.
And that’s not enough, most of your money is lost while making ‘decisions’. Everyone is relying on data – that isn’t accurate or has multiple copies, most of your employee’s time will be spent on finding the up-to-date data.
Final Thoughts
To overcome these issues and drawbacks of legacy systems you need to shift from modern systems. You can take legacy application modernization service to get rid of it.
