What is Legacy Modernization?

Over time, legacy systems become ineffective and exhibit errors, critical issues, and bugs that impact public sector organizations ability to execute on their core mission. Therefore, organizations need to approach the idea of integrating new solutions into their technological framework. Legacy modernization is the continued process of transforming legacy systems while modernizing and improving antiquated data infrastructures to increase data consistency, reduce IT environment complexity, and simplify processes. It is an effective approach to embrace the speed and agility of today's technology while still preserving the knowledge in older systems.

Legacy Modernization Offers Several Benefits

• Reduced processing time and effort
• Improved performance and user experience
• Cost-effectiveness
• IT agility
• Accurate insights for better decision-making
• Improved resilience

Organizations Can Navigate Their Legacy Modernization Programs Through a Combination of the Seven Approaches, Known as the 7Rs:

• Replace: Decommission and replace all old systems and legacy elements
• Rebuild: Restructure and optimize legacy components for a cloud-native environment
• Re-platform: Minimal code changes to adapt to a new platform
• Rehost: Deploying legacy components in a new virtual, physical or cloud environment without modifying or changing the functionality or code
• Rearchitect or refactor: Incorporating new technologies in different application tiers to benefit from cloud-based or other systems, with some code changes in selected tiers
• Retain: No updates or changes in the current systems
• Retire: Shutting down the system altogether after assessing the usage, workload, and business impact

Despite the Benefits, Organization Leaders and State CIOs May Face Certain Challenges While Modernizing Legacy Systems, Such As

• Resistance to transformation and change management
• Lack of direction, vision, and collaboration
• Integrating modern tools into legacy systems
• An incorrect modernization approach
• Time and cost of transforming systems

With technologies like Big Data, AI, automation, and cloud becoming more mainstream, public sector organizations have several options to navigate their legacy modernization programs more effectively and improve outcomes.

Related reading

• Modernizing Legacy IT into IT of the Future
• Legacy Systems vs Modern Systems