Understanding the Costs and Risks of Maintaining Legacy Applications

Application modernization is a top priority of organizations looking to streamline business processes, enhance the user experience and move more workloads to the cloud. Many organizations have business-critical software that has been used for decades, and dedicate as much as 70 percent of their IT budgets to supporting these applications.

But some organizations remain hesitant to replace legacy software that’s still getting the job done. Often they’re concerned about the costs and business risks of upgrades, or simply don’t realize the extent to which the old apps are holding them back.

Here’s a look at some of the major drawbacks of maintaining legacy applications.

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Supporting Outdated Programming Languages

By some estimates, more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are still in production, often running on old mainframe systems. Some organizations still use DOS-based applications that are command-line driven and have a “green screen” interface. These organizations typically can’t calculate the effort they put into maintaining this legacy software.

On top of that, organizations are facing a “brain drain” due to the retirement of older programmers. They are among the few who still know the legacy programming languages, and have years of experience maintaining the applications their organizations depend on. When they leave, that knowledge often walks out the door with them.

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Maintaining Vulnerable Infrastructure

The cost of maintaining legacy software isn’t limited to the application itself. The operating requirements of older applications often force organizations to maintain very vulnerable infrastructure. In addition to maintenance costs, which are generally substantial, organizations face tremendous risk if the old hardware fails.

More significantly, older equipment typically has security flaws that are widely known and regularly exploited. It’s impossible to patch or update the operating system or software, so organizations must find ways to isolate these systems from the open Internet.

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Using the Wrong Tools for the Job

Companies often have homegrown tools that were created by nonprogrammers using available software. An excellent example is the use of Excel as a database. A lot of effort is put into maintaining large, complex spreadsheets that perform a critical function for the company.

As the organization grows and evolves, the amount of rigor involved in maintaining these tools becomes a real productivity drain. Furthermore, the organization doesn’t fully realize how critical these tools are, or how easily they could break and cause all kinds of problems.

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Significant Performance Problems

When organizations run legacy applications on newer hardware, they often create significant performance problems. An organization might spend millions on a new storage system only to have the infrastructure grind to a halt when an old database is attached to it. The investment that was meant to increase speed delivers nothing.

Older wireless devices are another good example. If just one device runs outdated wireless protocols, the whole network will run at the speed of that slow device.

How DeSeMa Can Help

The DeSeMa team has helped many organizations understand the cost and risk of their legacy apps and develop a roadmap for replacing or upgrading them. We map what the applications are doing and what they’re dependent on so that stakeholders can make effective decisions.

If the application cannot be replaced, we specialize in bottling the application in its own private infrastructure so that it's not slowing down the rest of the organization. This also helps reduce cyber risk. If the application is attacked, the breach only impacts that application and the damages are contained.

Decades-old applications often support critical business processes. Organizations spend enormous time and money supporting these apps and their underlying infrastructure. If skillsets are lost, the application breaks or a cyberattack strikes, the organization faces potentially devastating downtime. DeSeMa can help you assess your legacy applications and develop a plan for replacing, updating or isolating them