Legacy Applications Modernisation
What is a legacy application?
In the IT world, a legacy application is a piece of software or a system of applications that has aged in comparison to more recently developed or implemented applications. This has caused it to become heavily deficient in functionality compared with the expectations of its end users or the organisation. While not obsolete, this application is no longer meeting the business or organisational requirements.
This has happened to many applications since the advent of cloud computing and the high levels of mobility, and accessibility users have become accustomed to in their daily lives.
The telltale signs that a system or application has become outdated or ‘legacy’ are:
- Interoperability with other enterprise systems is poor.
- Availability of the application is falling short of user’s requirements.
- The application is not easy to use by current standards.
- Issues surrounding the security of the system may have been raised.
Impacts of Legacy Applications
We find that legacy applications are very problematic to the organisations where they are allowed to remain – consuming support resources and budgets out of proportion to the relative importance they should have to the organisation’s operational expenditure. These legacy applications become ‘protected’ by the budgets they require to keep them working, with specialised support resources and processes wrapped around them that become ever-more expensive to maintain as newer implemented systems’ capabilities and platforms continue to diverge from the legacy ones.
Published survey results of the budget levels organisations need to allocate to applications support and maintenance (ASM) are in the region of 38% of overall IT budget. In our experience, the real figures are often much higher.
How to deal with Legacy Applications
In an ideal world, a roadmap for all applications should be pro-actively managed and at the point where any application is identified as having one of the ‘legacy’ characteristics defined above, should be replatformed or redeveloped to better support the growth of the organisation for the future – consequently reducing the ASM burden on the IT support team.
Netcompany has significant experience addressing legacy applications for clients across many industry verticals – from manufacturing to central government.
We refer to the approach we take as our Legacy Application Migration and Modernisation Services (LAMMS).
Our clients fall into two broad groups of requirements:
1. They have applications or systems whose availability or functionality is limited by the platform they are currently hosted on.
2. They have applications which themselves are no longer fit for purpose and must be redeveloped.
Choosing a partner for LAMMS
We’re skilled in reducing infrastructure and hosting costs through a series of cloud-based solutions and developing applications in the most security-sensitive environments and where applications are ‘mission critical’. We are trusted by some of the largest and most technically complex organisations to deliver applications and platforms fit for the ambitious plans they have for the future of their IT capabilities.
Our broad experience with legacy applications, cloud migrations and digital development makes Netcompany an ideal partner to digitally transform your organisation and reduce your IT support costs.
We’ll always engage with commercial terms that will suit you and offer our fixed price, outcome based commitment with ongoing options such as delivering a managed service provided as a Software as a Service solution.