Three Ways Legacy Applications Will Cost You Big

1. Your Staff and Their Knowledge Will Evaporate

• staff turnover and role changes will deplete your collective application knowledge
• developers will move on to new versions of the application, programming languages, and operating environments
• remaining administrative staff will reorient to focus on supporting current business applications

Are you retaining the right staff? What are you doing to maintain a minimal level of competency with your application? Will your developers be able to create a fix when, not if, your application runs into a bug?

2. Your Software Will Succumb to Bit Rot

• your software vendor will sunset support for your version of the application
• worse, the vendor may be acquired by a competitor who wants to push their solution
• databases, software tools, and other related software will also become obsolete
• backup and recovery software will move on, undermining your recovery capability

Can you honestly consider your application "supported"? Is your application vendor supporting the related software too? Do you honestly believe your software vendor is tackling these very same issues that you face? Do you even have the floppy disks to reinstall the software? Can you get good backups? Can you really recover your application from those backups? Have you verified your recovery strategy?

3. Your Hardware Will Fail

• old hardware fails, sometimes spectacularly
• good replacement parts become scarce
• your hardware vendor will sunset support for your version of the operating system
• ancillary systems critical to problem solving will also fail

How much does down time cost you? Can you get replacement parts? How quickly can you get them? Can your remaining staff even recover the servers? Will you ever need operating system patches, drivers or firmware again? Where will you find them? Are you maintaining your development and testing environments too?

Migrate Away from Your Legacy Application without Delay
Legacy applications are like a musty blanket thrown over a dresser in a damp basement. Sure the blanket stinks, but what it covers is likely rotting and stinks just as badly.

Make a conscious decision to modernize your legacy applications before they stink too. Delaying action is easy because the cost and risk of inaction are obscure. Don't let that obscurity fool you. Time is working against you. Take action while you still can.