How modernising your legacy system could help increase business efficiency.
When you think of the alarming rate at which the world is changing and the technology trends popping up every year, deciding to stick with what you know is the easiest choice.
This can be a good thing— a constant reminder that your company doesn’t need to hop on every trend to stand out in the industry.
But a healthy mix of consistency and adaptability is how businesses attain sustainable growth.
You can maintain elements of your core business processes while adopting new technology that helps you serve your customers better.
Fast-growing businesses understand that this digital transformation era isn’t just about accruing extra IT cost. Instead, it’s a step towards maximising productivity in the workplace and using technology as a catalyst for business growth.
What is Legacy System Modernisation?
Legacy application modernisation is about updating outdated business systems to meet customer expectations, improve efficiency, and support integrations with new bits of technology and software.
Although amenable to the idea of legacy software modernisation, you may not know when exactly is the right time to kick off this process. However, you’ll know It’s time to modernise your legacy systems when:
- Legacy system maintenance costs exceed the costs of modernisation.
- Your IT security is compromised.
- The legacy system is unable to process large volumes of data in record time.
- Your infrastructure is unable to identify data processing errors and resolve them quickly.
- The IT infrastructure is incompatible with modern software applications
- The system crashes frequently
Four ways legacy system modernisation can improve business efficiency
- All-round Data Security: According to Business 2 Community, outdated systems are more vulnerable to malware attacks due to the absence of automatic upgrades. With modern IT infrastructure, you can shield all business transactions, company and customer data from bad actors.
- Streamlined Workflow: legacy systems slow down over time and no longer function as they used to. This can cause a lot of delays in the workflow and a decline in productivity.
On the other hand, modern systems built with cloud-native technologies grant developers access to sophisticated tools, project management applications, and cloud computing for better organisational efficiency.
When your IT infrastructure is fortified with new-age technologies, your workforce can be more productive, and you’ll witness a significant rise in employee engagement.
- Business Agility: modern systems can process large volumes of data at an alarming speed, automate repetitive tasks, and even be helpful in database management. This means that your business can scale your offer to reach more customers, onboard them faster, and deliver updates as and when due.
In addition, you can leverage modern IT systems to connect with customers on their preferred feedback channels (e.g., email, live chat, Facebook messenger) and offer extensive support.
- Reduced IT Costs: because they’re older and slower, legacy systems consume more IT-related costs. Migrating to the cloud from on-premise data centres gives you access to more affordable, scalable solutions. Most cloud solutions are subscription-based, so you can pay as you use instead of making a large one-time payment. This pricing flexibility allows you to repurpose capital for more pressing projects.
To remain relevant in an ever-changing market, you must be adaptable to new solutions— as long as they boost organisational efficiency.
Modernising your legacy systems is the first step in a digital transformation that will fast-track productivity and business growth in the long run. Today, digital transformation will be incomplete without the use of cloud services such as cloud adoption, cloud migration, and cloud transformation. Legacy modernisation involves shifting applications to the cloud. Cloud adoption prevents catastrophic data loss that could hurt your business operation.
Cloud migration offers your business lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and increased innovation opportunities. Modernise your apps and set up APIs to allow the newly migrated apps to interface with enterprise software with minimal risk.
Excellent cloud services assess your business infrastructure, modernise your software applications and guarantee cloud security and optimisation. Migrating to the cloud makes your legacy system agile, flexible, and ready to meet customer and market expectations.
