5 Signs It’s Time to Modernize Your Applications
Software applications and systems can make or break your ability to adapt, develop and compete in the market. With business dynamics changing constantly, it can be difficult to keep your software capabilities matched up with the organizational growth.
This is particularly true for the companies with a long-established market having high reliance on software that was developed years ago. Upgrading these outdated platforms may seem like a daunting task because legacy systems are critical for day-to-day operations but it certainly pays off in a long run.
Why Modernize Legacy Applications?
Here are a few of the reasons
- According to Logicalis, more than 4 out of 10 Chief Information Officers considered “complex legacy technology” a significant barrier to true digital transformation.
- 90% of businesses are held back in terms of growth and enhanced efficiency due to old technology.
- Legacy systems can cost a business 10-15% more per year, for maintenance alone.
- Slow, old tech impairs productivity, with 48% of UK employees wasting three hours or more per day due to inefficient systems.
Continuing to use aging technology means you can’t keep a finger on the pulse of the company’s software at all times. With such tech-savvy end consumers, legacy systems often lack the flexibility and scalability to keep up with the growth and competition, handcuffing businesses.
Top Signs it’s Time to Modernize Your Legacy Applications
For some, the decision to modernize legacy applications can be difficult. This change can feel like an expensive, time-consuming, and intimidating task. What’s actually more costly is the loss of productivity, performance, and competitiveness while maintaining an aging application.
It’s important to recognize the red flags that point towards the need for modernization in applications.
- Maintenance and operational cost is high
Future of Work found that up to 80% of companies’ IT budget is spent on keeping legacy systems afloat when they could be used for new projects and purchases. When the cost of maintaining surpasses the benefits of the software, it’s no brainer that it’s time to modernize the software.
Investing in software with decreasing life will only reduce your business value and you’ll be throwing your money down the drain. It’s better to invest in modernizing your applications, strengthening your business strategies, improving efficiency, and generating higher revenue for your organization.
2. Business processes have changed
As your business ages, functionality gaps with your existing application will appear because you don’t do business the same way you did when the software was created. As your business grows and expands, it becomes hard to merge the new process with the application’s core functionality. These functionality gaps negatively impact costs, productivity, and overall business objectives. Hence, it better to modernize legacy applications and improve functionality.
3. The cost of performance issues
For most companies, waiting several minutes to load a task might not seem like a big deal as long as customers remain unaware of it. But what if your 100 employees have to face these 5 minutes of outage every day, every year? You might deal with such outages immediately but your employees are losing around 50 workdays annually.
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. 81% of respondents indicated that 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000. 33% of those enterprises reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1-5 million.
Since the nature of the disruptions and outages are often unexpected, slow processing, multiple glitches, and frequent crashes are other red flags indicating to modernize the software.
4. Security Threats
Ensuring your systems are secure is a key priority as most businesses have shifted towards more remote working. But with outdated hardware and software, legacy systems are not always easy to keep secure and accommodated with today’s best security practices.
Such software can’t even receive security patches with the old encryption algorithm and cannot produce complicated safe passwords through modern technology. In a recent Accenture study of government agencies, 85% of IT leaders believe not updating legacy technology will threaten their agency’s future.
Moreover, a study of 500 companies that had experienced data breaches, IBM Security found that the average cost of a data breach was nearly $4 million – including “lost business, negative impact on reputation and employee time spent on recovery.” Thus security threats are one of the key issues to modernize legacy systems.
5. Lack of mobile accessibility
Mobile accessibility has become a huge factor in overall competitiveness and many legacy systems don’t follow it. It can be only accessed through the mainframes within the offices leaving you in a low efficient and high-cost environment, that you’re trying to eliminate.
Though this might keep your systems secure but it’s highly inconvenient to make remote working possible in today’s digital economy. With an investment in cloud-enabled technology, employees can take full advantage of the time and watch their productivity take off.
Modernize your system today!
Don’t allow concern over the transition from your aging legacy app keep you from enhancing your business operations. Gartner predicts that every dollar invested in innovating digital business innovation through 2020 will require enterprises to spend at least three times that to continuously modernize the legacy application portfolio.
iLink Digital enables and accelerates digital transformation with its main focus on application and data modernization. Our experts have the experience to help you reconstruct your legacy application and suggest concrete next steps in your software modernization process.
Endnotes
2.https://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500248467/Legacy-systems-holding-back-90-per-cent-of-businesses
3.https://pro2col.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/whitepaper_3MistakesITmakes.pdf
4.https://www.talk-business.co.uk/2015/03/12/uk-businesses-waste-over-28000-a-year-on-inefficiency/
5.https://fowmedia.com/time-update-legacy-systems/
6.https://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-downtime/
7.https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/us-federal-government/barriers-to-modernization
