Legacy platforms — meaning IT applications and platforms that businesses implemented decades ago, and which still power production workloads — are what you might call the “third rail” of IT estates. IT leaders often worry that if they touch legacy systems, they could break them in ways that lead to catastrophic problems — just as touching the high-voltage third rail on a subway line could kill you. At the same time, however, the business may have so much riding on legacy technology that it can’t afford not to maintain and update it.
That’s why, like it or not, legacy system modernization is a challenge the typical organization must face sooner or later. Businesses must either find a way to migrate off of their legacy platforms entirely or modernize the platforms in ways that reduce complexity and risk while still keeping critical services running.
As a veteran of both approaches, I’m here to tell you that legacy system modernization is rarely fast or easy. But when managed the right way, it can substantially boost the value of IT resources, while minimizing the risks stemming from migrating away from outdated IT platforms.
Allow me to explain by discussing what legacy platform modernization entails, along with tips on how to streamline the complex process of migrating data from legacy platforms.
What is a legacy platform, exactly?
Legacy platform is a relative term. In general, it means any IT system or infrastructure solution that an organization no longer considers the ideal fit for its needs, but which it still depends on because the platform hosts critical workloads.
Designating something as a legacy platform doesn’t necessarily mean that the original platform vendor no longer supports it. On the contrary, vendors like IBM, Oracle and SAP remain very committed to continuing to support enterprise offerings that they first introduced decades ago.
Nor does legacy platform imply that a solution is inherently insecure, unreliable, or cost-prohibitive to operate.
Instead, the term simply means that the solution is no longer delivering as much value as it could if the business replaced it with an alternative offering or modernized certain aspects of it.
What is legacy system modernization?
The meaning of legacy system modernization can be a bit challenging to pin down because IT leaders often use the term to refer to two fundamentally different processes.
The first is migrating data and workloads off of legacy platforms entirely and rehosting them in new environments, like the public cloud. This is one way to modernize a legacy system, and it’s common for organizations that are prepared to refactor or redevelop their applications from scratch so that they will run in a competently new environment.
Another option is to keep a legacy platform in place but upgrade to a more modern version of it. For example, a business that depends on the SAP platform could move older, on-prem SAP applications to modern HANA-based Cloud ERP and migrate other integrated applications to SAP RISE (a platform that provides access to most core AI-enabled SAP solutions via a fully managed cloud hosting architecture). This is a way to reap the benefits of cloud migration without having to overhaul all existing workloads.
The end result of both modernization processes is the same: The organization gets an IT solution that is better aligned with modern workflows and business priorities. However, depending on the development resources available for rewriting applications, as well as the timeline the organization is targeting, migrating wholesale off of legacy platforms is not always as feasible as taking the easier route of upgrading to a newer version of a legacy offering.
Legacy modernization risks
No matter how you approach it, modernizing workloads hosted on a system that dates back decades is no simple feat. Common risks include:
- Lack of in-house expertise: Often, the staff who implemented legacy systems and know the most about how they work are long gone from an organization by the time the business decides to modernize it. As a result, there may be no one in-house who deeply understands the technology or how best to align it with organizational priorities.
- Workload disruption: Modernization may require taking workloads or services offline for some period, which could disrupt business operations.
- Data loss: Mistakes during the modernization or migration process could lead to data loss, corruption or quality degradation.
- Data exposure: Even worse, errors during modernization could expose sensitive data stored inside legacy systems to unauthorized parties, leading to data privacy breaches.
- Compatibility issues: Migrating to a newer platform could break compatibility between legacy technologies and other applications or services.
- Project delays: The complexity of modernization projects, and the many variables involved, often mean that work takes longer to complete than anticipated. In the meantime, critical workloads may not run at full scale, if at all, and the IT department can be left in the unenviable position of having to maintain both the legacy platform and its replacement at the same time because production workloads are still in the process of moving from the former to the latter.
- Failure to add value: There is no magical guarantee that replacing legacy technology with something newer will create value. On the contrary, poor planning and design decisions could result in a scenario where modernization spawns more cost, security and/or IT management problems than it solves.
How to simplify legacy platform modernization
To minimize the risk of challenges like these, IT leaders must approach legacy system modernization in a systematic way — one rooted in best practices like the following, which help to streamline and speed up complex modernization processes while reducing the chance that something will go wrong.
1. Remove the data ROT
Legacy systems are often home to outdated or inconsistent data. If you move that data as is into modern applications, it will make them less efficient while also increasing the complexity of data management.
This is why modernization is the ideal time to remove redundant, obsolete or trivial data — otherwise known as ROT. This includes, for example, duplicate records, data that is improperly encoded, and data with missing values.
2. Adopt the right migration approach
There are multiple ways to switch over from a legacy environment to a more modern one. The fastest but riskiest is the big bang approach, in which you move everything at once. An alternative is phased migration, where you migrate workloads incrementally; this reduces risk, with the tradeoff that it can take longer.
A third option, parallel run, involves deploying two complete copies of your applications at the same time — one hosted on the legacy platform and the other in the modern one — and spinning down the legacy workloads only after you’ve confirmed that their replacements are fully up and running properly. This approach minimizes risk, but it’s more complex and costly because it requires running two environments in parallel.
3. Build integrations during modernization
Don’t wait until after you’ve migrated to a new platform to build the integrations necessary to connect your workloads to other applications and services. Instead, make the integration process a core part of the modernization effort itself, which helps to ensure seamless connectivity between your legacy and modern applications.
In practice, this means undertaking initiatives like testing whether an upgraded version of a legacy app can connect properly to cloud-based applications or APIs, and if not, investing in the development effort necessary to build the right integration.
4. Protect data security and privacy
Along similar lines, ensuring data security and privacy shouldn’t be something you do after modernization is complete. Build these efforts into the migration process through practices like encrypting data in transit and at rest and implementing the access controls necessary to minimize the risk of data exposure.
You’ll also want to be sure to consider whether your business is subject to specific regulatory requirements, like those defined in GDPR, HIPAA and the CPRA, and build in the appropriate data protections, auditing, and monitoring capabilities.
5. Formulate a data governance plan
When you move data and workloads to a new platform, your assumptions surrounding roles and responsibilities for data governance are likely to change. Your data governance procedures must change accordingly. It may be necessary to designate new data stewards, define new data usage policies and update data lifecycle rules, for example.
6. Establish backup and recovery procedures
Similarly, the backup and recovery strategies that sufficed for a legacy system may no longer be appropriate after modernization (or you may have had no backup and recovery processes in place for your legacy technology at all). As a result, the modernization project should include steps to ensure that modernized workloads are adequately backed up and that the IT organization is prepared to recover data and applications following an outage.
7. Loop in all stakeholders
IT leaders are usually the primary drivers of legacy system modernization, but they shouldn’t be the only ones in conversations about why and how to make changes to legacy systems. Other stakeholders — such as representatives of the various business units that depend on legacy technology, risk management and compliance officers and cybersecurity experts — can also offer important perspectives on how best to approach modernization efforts. The more centrally these people are involved in planning and operational decisions, the smoother migration efforts tend to go.
Reducing IT risk — without the risk
The ultimate measure of a legacy system modernization initiative’s effectiveness is the extent to which it reduces risk and complexity without adding cost. When you approach modernization from this perspective, it becomes easier to focus on the tasks that matter most — updating or replacing legacy resources with more scalable, secure, reliable, and efficient alternatives like SAP Cloud ERP on the RISE platform — and avoid making mistakes that may leave you with an expensive overhaul that delivers little real value.
Kausik Chaudhuri is the CIO of Lemongrass. He is a thought leader known for designing, deploying, migrating and running complex technical solutions for mission-critical enterprise applications, including SAP. At Lemongrass, he is responsible for platform and enterprise architecture, product management capability and platform enablement of the delivery service team.
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