In the past, legacy systems were the backbone of many industries. But today, they’ve become a major obstacle for businesses striving to achieve their full potential.
Organizations of all kinds are now pushing forward, and they consistently complain about the performance and compatibility issues they keep facing while depending on outdated systems.
Actually, these systems were not even designed to support the latest demands for flexibility. In fact, this outdated technology risks data integrity and drives up costs while seriously encumbering innovation. So, how do you get past these issues?
This blog post uncovers the strategic steps you can take to transition from rigid setups to agile ones. You’ll learn about the latest future-ready systems that support growth according to demands.
The Challenges of Legacy Systems
This is a hyper-digital business ecosystem where data exerts great force. Businesses part of this ecosystem are leaning into the latest tech options to improve their competitive position. But many organizations, looking to leverage data, still continue to be burdened by legacy systems.
Once mission-critical, archaic systems are now obstacles to innovation.
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1. Security Vulnerabilities
Legacy systems today pose one of the greatest concerns of modern enterprise security.
Imagine a company struggling with outdated tech. A recent study found that nearly half of data breaches are tied to outdated systems.
2. Limited Scalability
Old systems typically lack the required flexibility to scale operations. This becomes particularly worrying for businesses facing fluctuating demands.
At their core, cloud solutions like Azure are inherently designed for scalability. They can optimize their offerings to handle any growing needs for resources dynamically. In contrast, legacy systems use monolithic architecture and can only scale vertically as they need to incorporate expensive hardware to increase resources.
Key scalability limitations in legacy systems:
- Rigid infrastructure
- Manual resource allocation
- Incompatibility with today’s workloads
For example, let’s say there is an e-com business stuck with outdated on-prem infrastructure. Now, they may find it super challenging to expand their capacity when traffic peaks in holidays.
3. Performance Inefficiencies
Performance degradation in older systems is a recurring problem. The demand for real-time processing is high, and users expect high-speed data access.
61% of small businesses with old systems report frequent downtime. That’s a big problem!
Remember, the apps that we use are typically voraciously resource-hungry. Legacy systems often hit performance bottlenecks on top of having a severely limited capacity to handle data demands for such apps. That clearly means serious limitations like:
- Long processing times
- Inadequate data handling
- Latency in data access
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4. Cost Implications with Outdated Systems
The cost of maintaining outdated infrastructure has already gone through the roof. Support for these systems used to be cost-effective, but not anymore.
Businesses end up paying 15-20% more each year by sticking with outdated systems instead of upgrading to cloud solutions.
Legacy systems incur tremendous operational costs, whether rolling out software patches after patches or repeatedly replacing hardware components.
More so, they require more power, bigger physical footprint, which means they are a burden on your energy and data-center costs.
5. End of Vendor Support
Remember that hundreds of legacy systems have had vendor-declared End-of-Life (EOL) status.
For example, Microsoft has long stopped offering mainstream support for Windows Server 2012 and extended support for Exchange Server 2013. Without vendor-provided patches, these systems are sure to become ever more appealing to exploitation attempts. Doesn’t it restrict their business intelligence and data-fueled decision-making?
Risks of Unsupported Systems
Cybercriminals will sure have a field day with unsupported software. It’s like a doorway into cyberattacks, just like these vulnerabilities behaved as a portal into unpatched Windows systems during the massive 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack.
Compliance risks
Many industries, say, healthcare (HIPAA), finance (PCI-DSS), etc. now require properly supported systems to avoid millions in fines or penalties for non-compliance. Also, new software and hardware changes cannot be merged with legacy systems. Surely, that has added limits to their utility.
Overall, companies running on platforms no longer supported may be forced to pay a price to tackle the complexity of system maintenance.
The Business Impact of Failing to Modernize
Companies still dependent on old-school solutions face long-term problems, often taking them out of the cut-throat competition they can’t escape.
There are vulnerabilities of unsupported platforms and there are high risks of performance going down, and together, these factors create a devastating loophole for system failure and, often costly, data breaches, all while exposing your organization to tight regulatory scrutiny. This risk can cause serious reputational loss, remember.
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Modernization is the Path to Overcoming Legacy System Challenges
You can tackle legacy systems-driven issues using solutions coming from today’s normal: cloud-based tech.
Following are the main modernization strategies WME suggests to their customers.
1. Strengthen Defenses with Advanced Cloud Security
Cloud options offer a wide list of cybersecurity features so you can easily compensate for all the capabilities typically missing in your existing systems.
There are giants like Microsoft Azure, with which we work very closely. Then you may find Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud worthy of investment, they are all good. In fact, they have invested hefty amounts in evolving security technology to be able to provide businesses like yours to focus on their core areas rather than just getting around building and maintaining security arrangements.
You can say the hardware and maintenance cost that you would pay inefficiently with legacy systems is easily optimized with the cloud, and with so many added advantages. Yes, a solid win-win.
Security benefits with cloud-based modernization
Zero Trust Architecture
This model assumes that every entity is a potential threat, both inside and outside. It doesn’t rely on the idea of trusted or untrusted devices or networks. It treats everything equally, no matter what the history.
Solutions like Entra ID offer very fine-grained user capabilities. This is their way of enabling you to enforce securer authentication procedures for all users, no matter where they come from.
AI-Powered Threat Detection
These platforms leverage ML and AI to detect anomalies without delay and automatically flag doubtful activity/breach paths.
Now this advancement has made their job easier, and with tech evolvements like Copilot for Security, you can also leverage that without having to invest much. Yes, everything is moving ahead at an astonishing pace, you just need to be aware of what’s happening.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud also integrates AI-enabled threat intelligence to prevent, detect, respond to recurring threats throughout your ecosystem.
Built-In Compliance
This feature can be crucial in industries managing sensitive stuff i.e. financial or healthcare data. These cloud providers come prepared to comply with frameworks, which you often find as your top priority, like HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.
2. Achieving Seamless Scalability
Today’s cloud platforms offer some real elastic scalability. What does that mean?
Basically, they allow you to rapidly expand your resources when responding to evolving demand circumstances, whenever you need, and without any geographical boundaries.
Traditional on-prem infrastructure requires upfront purchasing, setup, maintenance, a technician support system, hardware knowledge, and whatnot, but cloud systems come prepared to scale and with zero hassle like this. They provide quite easy scaling up/down options, with all the luxurious controls over everything you desire.
Elastic Compute Power
Let’s say Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines. They scale up and down their computing capabilities automatically as needed. For example, during peak times, say during season traffic on e-commerce websites, the system increases resources to manage high workloads automatically. You only pay for what you consume, and most people are happy with it.
Storage Scalability
Good examples can be Azure Blob Storage or AWS S3. They provide almost limitless data storage. Especially when dealing with massive amounts of unstructured data i.e. video, images, or customer records, just trust them.
Coverage on a Global Level
Businesses can use the global infrastructure assets of these highly trustworthy cloud platforms to distribute applications across their user bases.
A good example is Azure’s Global Network, where you can deploy your apps in data centers located on different continents to mitigate latency. Now, this advantage definitely translates into a better user experience and a skyrocketing business. What do you think?
3. Enhance Both Performance and Agility Simultaneously
Moving from unidimensional systems to cloud architectures offers benefits like microservices and serverless computing, so you can split your apps into smaller, independent parts. This is how you achieve a radical difference in performance, agility, ease of maintenance, etc.
Microservices Architecture
Individual services in an application can be deployed, scaled, managed independently. Even big players like Netflix and Spotify use microservices for better performance and to facilitate system-wide change without interrupting the whole structure.
Serverless Computing
Going serverless with AWS Lambda or Azure Functions allows you to execute code without having to provision or manage servers. To achieve this, apps are designed to scale dynamically for higher performance whenever needed.
Edge Computing
Edge computing gives your business a way to deploy computing power closer to the user. This is how you reduce latency for apps processing real-time data. One such example is Azure Edge Zones, which provides the capability to place computing power at the network edge to deliver faster response times for mission-critical workloads.
4. Reduce Costs with Pay-As-You-Go, Consumption-Based Models
One of the reasons every company is nowadays pulling towards cloud and leaving on-prem workloads is massive cost savings. On the flip side, traditional infrastructure demands your business to keep spending on expensive hardware.
AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, all provide this pricing model where you pay for only what you consume. No fixed costs. Flexibility for both the cloud vendor and buyers like yours. This is a real cost-effective solution that lowers your expenditure headaches arising from having to run idle servers and pool underutilized hardware.
Cost Efficiency with Auto-Scaling
A mid-sized business that migrates from on-prem infrastructure to cloud-based servers can save around 30+% of operational costs.
Organizations can use services like auto-scaling to adjust the resources dynamically according to real-time needs. This means virtual machines and services can also be scaled up or down based on workload, saving time as well as costs. For example, Azure Autoscale gives a similar option.
Sustainability & Energy Efficiency
Cloud providers are rooted deeply in energy-saving ecosystems. You can reduce your carbon emissions by moving there and help drive energy efficiency faster than using traditional data centers because cloud providers often get more work done per unit of energy used.
5. Ensure Long-Term Support and Future-Proofing
Modernizing IT infrastructure prepares your business to take on any challenge and jump on the faintest of opportunities. Modern platforms offer the benefits of vendor support, ongoing innovation, access to new features as they arise, and a vibrant community to discuss problems and solutions.
Nonstop Vendor Support
Cloud platforms keep getting undeterred support and updates as they are proudly backed by their vendors with security patches, performance enhancements, new features, etc. To put this into context with a practical example, Azure Update Management enables organizations to automate update installation on their servers.
Utilizing Modern Technologies
Try to incorporate modern tech capabilities like AI, IoT, blockchain, etc. This way, you can maintain your competitive advantage as these innovations bring sophisticated features into your current ops.
Innovation-as-a-Service
Cloud vendors often offer tools and stuff to accelerate innovation i.e. Azure Cognitive Services for AI-trained customer insights; AWS SageMaker for ML models. Going with these services, you make yourself able to rapidly prototype new solutions.
Conclusion: The Imperative for Modernization
It is clear that continuing with aging legacy systems – security loopholes, scalability issues, and other problems that may imperil your company over time – is dangerous. Yet, by modernizing your infrastructure and moving to these highly efficient platforms, you can pave the way for security and innovation.
Next Steps
Ready to kickstart your modernization journey? Get in touch with Windows Management Experts, Inc. now. Our team of pros will dive deep into your current systems and whip up a custom modernization strategy to fit your business needs.
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