Businesses have always looked to technology to gain an edge. Never has this been truer than with digital transformation. A Deloitte survey says that digital transformation is the “single most important investment now and into the future that organizations can make to drive enterprise value.” Businesses are eager to harness the power of AI and other emerging tools to drive ROI and operational efficiency.
But digital transformation isn’t always easy. Legacy systems that businesses rely on present hurdles in bringing those businesses into the future. According to Forbes, more than half the enterprise leaders it surveyed cited systems migrations as a “key challenge facing their business.”
Legacy systems often drag down ROI through maintenance costs, system inefficiencies, and security vulnerabilities. Outdated systems also lack the ability to integrate with newer tools, hurting customer experiences and business processes.
There’s also the fading lack of support. Recently, Microsoft announced it will end support for Office 2016 and 2019 in October, part of a broader trend of sunsetting support for legacy systems.
The future is clear—businesses must embrace digital transformation. But they must do it smartly and efficiently.
The Impact of Legacy Systems on Digital Transformation
Legacy systems are outdated hardware, software, and other technology. Despite being difficult to maintain and use, many businesses still rely on systems like these. They often lack support, and their outdated interfaces and platforms create inefficiencies and introduce security risks. Businesses, however, are often reluctant to update these systems. The cost and complexity of digital transformation create a reluctance to replace them.
The cost of such reluctance can be staggering. According to CIO Dive, almost two-thirds of businesses spend more than $2 million simply maintaining these outdated systems. Perhaps more concerning, 60% of IT leaders said that their legacy systems are experiencing “moderate to severe negative impact due to technical debt, including outdated code.”
Digital transformation is a way out from under the costs, both real and future, of outdated systems that are crushing budgets and operations.
What Companies Must Account for When Transitioning from Legacy Systems
Once companies commit to updating legacy systems, it’s vital to take the proper steps to carefully migrate their data from those systems to cloud-based solutions.
Data Mapping
Creating an accurate map of existing data is essential to ensure that the data from legacy systems is accounted for before it moves. This means understanding the data structure of legacy systems, then ensuring that it aligns with the new system’s architecture to prevent data loss or damage.
Next, it’s important to ensure the data set to be transferred is accurate, clean, and error-free. This can be accomplished with pre-migration data checks. Companies may discover they need to remove outdated, redundant, or incorrect data before it’s migrated.
Once the migration is complete, businesses should validate the data in the new systems by comparing it against the original system. Testing the cloud systems data to make sure it’s intact, accurate, and accessible will help avoid data loss.
Minimizing Data Loss
Before moving data, companies should implement robust backup strategies to safeguard against data loss. During migration, regular backups can protect against data corruption, errors, and interruptions. Cloud-based solutions provide extra layers of security and ensure a quick restoration if the migration encounters any issues.
A phased migration also significantly reduces the risk of data loss. Moving data in phases allows businesses to address issues with smaller sets of data, providing the time to troubleshoot potential issues before a larger migration.
Finally, real-time monitoring helps detect and address problems during migration. This process also allows businesses to set up alerts and notifications to help flag migration issues, ensuring problems are identified and resolved before they escalate.
Integration Challenges
Legacy systems are, by definition, built on outdated technologies, which can make them incompatible with modern cloud solutions. Ensuring that cloud systems work with legacy software might require custom integration, which takes time and resources.
A smooth and continuous flow of data between legacy systems and new cloud solutions can also be challenging. This exchange maintains business operations, and real-time synchronization might be necessary to ensure data integrity. Because legacy systems may lack standardized APIs or require specialized middleware, interfacing them with cloud solutions can be difficult. Some legacy systems require customization to connect with cloud solutions, adding time and cost to the migration.
A bumpy integration can cause delays and interruptions when legacy and cloud systems don’t work together seamlessly. The effect of these disruptions can be painful—drops in productivity and customer satisfaction. Employees, too, can suffer. They may find processes slowing down as they adapt to a new cloud system, and IT teams might get bogged down in troubleshooting integration issues.
Migrating legacy systems can also lead to service disruptions service, causing interruptions in customer-facing applications, dissatisfaction and loss of revenue. The impact on compliance and security should not be overlooked either. Risks to data integrity, security, and compliance increase if the legacy and cloud systems don’t have the same security standards.
Common Pitfalls and Their Effects on Scalability, Innovation, and Business Continuity
The cost of transitioning from legacy systems to cloud solutions isn’t always clear upfront. Companies often underestimate the amount of downtime migration can cause. Data bottlenecks, integration issues, and unforeseen troubleshooting can extend into unexpected delays.
These affect business functions that rely on legacy systems, such as customer service, sales, and inventory. Disruption and downtime can lead to employee productivity loss, a hit to the company’s reputation, or compliance risks.
Maintaining legacy systems often requires skilled personnel, external consultants, or additional staff to fill skill gaps. With migrations, companies are forced to expend significant upfront costs on new tools, licensing, training, and system configuration. Finally, end-users must be trained to use these new systems, training which demands significant time and resources.
The bottom line about legacy systems is that they too often stifle growth. Their rigid technology creates bottlenecks that handcuff a company’s ability to innovate or pivot to market demands and customer feedback. These systems also lack the scalability necessary to grow. Expanding companies may hit the ceilings of outdated systems, limiting their growth and flexibility.
Actionable Steps to Overcome Legacy System Challenges
To leave behind legacy systems, companies must find the right cloud-based solutions to grow with the business and be flexible enough to quickly adapt to the changing needs of the company and industry. Migrating to a cloud-based solution helps companies future-proof their business, making sure it’s ready to meet challenges and opportunities with scalable, flexible solutions.
Transiting to cloud-based solutions takes strategic planning. Mapping data, migrating in phrases, and planning for potential issues will reduce risk and maximize the ROI of digital transformation. The right migration tool should have the ability to automate basic tasks and advanced tools to simplify the process and avoid compliance issues and costly breaches.
As the business world moves on from legacy systems, companies need to follow suit. This requires forward-thinking strategies and careful planning. But now is the time to future-proof businesses with scalable cloud solutions that give businesses much-needed flexibility and security.
By Aaron Wadsworth
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