While the adage ‘old is gold’ may be true in many scenarios, it does not apply to your enterprise technology stack. Software, unfortunately, does not get better with age. As your business evolves, you may often find your legacy technology infrastructure holding you back from your growth aspirations. On one hand, your needs evolve with time; but equally important, legacy technology loses its usefulness as the ecosystem around it evolves.
Gartner says that enterprises should start implementing digital transformation projects in 2018 or risk falling behind their competition.
Impact of Legacy System on Business
Many times, the decision to replace legacy systems is not an easy one to make. This is especially true when you run critical business processes on your existing technology infrastructure. The fear of the unknown can seem daunting. But while the reluctance is understandable, the fact is that an out-dated technology stack can negatively impact company growth and severely impede any digital transformation efforts. There are several concerns:
• Maintenance and Lack of support:
Companies using outdated systems regardless of age or quality of the underlying technology not just struggle to cope with the latest businesses processes but also end up spending a lot of money on running and maintaining the out-dated technology stack. Due to its monolithic nature, any change or update in legacy system requires time and effort and its underlying architecture becomes more expensive to maintain at it ages. Besides, support from vendors becomes a challenge.
• Rigid and difficult to organise:
Unlike modern cloud-based solutions, legacy systems can be to reorganize as they are spread across several databases and storage resources; making storage space optimization difficult.
• IT Talent :
Finding the right talent with the specific skillsets and expertise to maintain your legacy system can be tough; making support and maintenance more expensive.
• Compliance and Security :
Outdated software systems limit a company’s compliance and integration levels. Also, legacy systems are usually less resistant to cyber-attacks.
But perhaps the most important drawback is that it puts severe limitations on the company’s ability to explore new avenues for growth. As this article in the Financial Times states, “It is a paradox that many companies, whose boards would prefer their businesses to be causing disruption with digital platforms, face disruption because of unwieldy and ageing platforms.”
Ready for a Digital Transformation?
Moving to a modern, cloud-based digital platform can unlock limitless possibilities, providing greater scope for innovations and bringing opportunities to outperform competitors, and improve market share. All around us, there are examples of companies that have embraced change and benefited from greater efficiencies, shorter innovation and product development cycles, and reduced the time to market.
If discarding your existing technology infrastructure seems too daunting or is not possible due to any reason, then it makes sense on bridging the technology gap by making existing data accessible via robust and secure APIs.
But to achieve a digital transformation, the best way forward is to adopt a platform-based approach that connects customers, vendors and partners, enabling customers to interact and transact seamlessly. Moving to a platform approach can create immense value for the ecosystem.
A platform - based model provides enterprises with four key benefits – flexibility, scalability, mobility and availability through collaboration of diverse participants.
Based on your unique needs and budgets, you might decide to either invest in a pre-built platform that is ready-to-go or a proprietary customized platform. Either way, the benefits will be there for all to see.
To know more about how platforms bring about a digital business revolution, click on the link below: https://www.sonata-software.com/blog/corporate/cracking-digital-code