1. Count the fails
It’s not the age of the system, necessarily, that is the biggest problem. Where it fails to do your bidding is the real issue.
“The first step in modernizing your IT system is to identify the specific failings of your current legacy system,” says Mo Hafez, senior solutions engineer at Expereo, an internet, cloud connectivity and SD-WAN provider. “Whether your specific problems or concerns are security, infrastructure, or a combination of those problems, identifying them early will ensure that your modernization efforts will be as efficient as possible.”
“The hardest, most challenging part involves setting your and your team’s expectations. A transformation requires taking little bites, one area at a time,” says Philip Morehead, director of product at Nexient, an agile software development provider.
2. Compare apples to barrels
Once you’ve identified where the failures are in aging systems, compute the costs in fixes, patches, upgrades, and add-ons to bring the system up to modern requirements. Now add any additional costs likely to be incurred in the near future to keep this system going. Compare the total to other available options, including a new or newer system.
“While this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, the last 2.5 years have proven just how quickly priorities can change,” says Brian Haines, chief strategy officer for FM:Systems, an integrated workspace management system software provider. “Rather than investing in point solutions that may serve the specific needs of the organization today, a workplace tech solution that offers the ability to add or even remove certain functions later to the same system means organizations can more efficiently respond to ever-changing business, employee, workplace, visitor and even asset needs going forward.”
3. Accelerate the automation
Make smart automation plans a part of your overall implementation strategy for modernizing your legacy systems.
“When it comes to automation, it’s all about building value to drive value. To modernize aging systems, there has to be a proactive approach to automation and understanding the ripple effects that come with it — then training for them across,” says Karlo Bustos, vice-president of Professional Services at Board Americas, a decision-making platform provider.
4. Do a madness check
You’re not saddled with legacy systems because you have a fetish for old and cranky tech. It’s much more likely that you inherited that bag of treachery, became a victim of way too many budget cuts, or got sucked into a black-hole mandate. Other types of madness may also be to blame.
“A significant challenge for IT experts is that some organizations have been previously unable to replace legacy systems due to regulatory or organizational mandates,” says Rod Simmons, vice president of product strategy at Omada, a provider of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) software. “Many organizations also succumb to the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy. They’ve invested so much time, money and energy into legacy systems that are barely working. Not to mention they are spending so much time trying to make what they have work, that it feels impossible to consider how things could be better.”
5. Get new keys
When you modernize legacy tech you can accidently create a few more gaps in its security. One such security flaw can spring from reusing old security keys. Either the keys themselves are already compromised, or you forget to destroy them when you get or make new keys and the old ones get compromised later.
Current encryption keys may be enough for now, given their enormous size and the inherent difficulty in cracking them. However, harvesting attackers are very patient and can be sitting on your system waiting on quantum computing to come online. If that’s a concern for your company, you may want to investigate the quantum keys that are already available.
While you’re tinkering around to make the system better, fit it with new security keys of some type, pay attention to whom you give assess to these new keys, and destroy the old keys.
6. Be fickle about partners
The reality is that you’ll need more partners and sometimes different partners as dictated by the needs of your business over time. There is no discernable advantage to being overly loyal or sentimental about any given partner, no matter how familiar or how cozy the relationship in the past.
Also look for ways to replace or augment partners with automation, AI, or simplified functionality.
7. Decouple data
Legacy applications and platforms are of the data silos. This is a potentially fatal flaw for any effort to modernize or optimize now — and going forward. So, look hard at freeing up that data and breaking down silos everywhere you can.
“De-couple data stores that are used by many monolithic applications and consolidate behind enterprise accessible services such as APIs,” advises Mark Schlesinger, senior technical fellow at Broadridge Financial Solutions.
Break all the black boxes, too.
“Mainframes are often called ‘black boxes’ of info for a reason: They’re webs of personalized code that have been managed by countless developer hands that have either exited their posts or retired altogether,” says Tim Jones, managing director of application modernization at Advanced, an international provider of application modernization services.
You may need a partner that is an expert in this type of black box cracking to help you get this done.
8. Double down on containers
Containers can make modernization easier, but they can also be used to double your deployments quickly and efficiently.
“Use containers in lower-level public cloud environments to build products that will be deployed to production on the private cloud, as well as for products that will be deployed in production to the public cloud when time to market is critical and/or when future portability is expected to be necessary,” says Mark Schlesinger, senior technical fellow at Broadridge Financial Solutions.
9. Reach for new tools even to fix old tech
Most modernization projects these days are too big to do fast and yet must be completed quickly. Your set of familiar tools may not be enough to get you across the finish line in time. Don’t hesitate to reach for new tools to make the work quicker.
“By utilizing modern IT models, new approaches to IT like DevOps or site reliability engineering [SRE], and particularly new advancements in technology like AIOps, more IT teams are leveraging AI-driven intelligence and automation to make quick and accurate decisions, allowing them to deliver resiliency despite immense pressures,” says Dinesh Nirmal, general manager for IBM Automation.
You can read more about Modernizing Aging IT Systems here.
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